Reuse & Permissions

It is not necessary to obtain permission to reuse this article or its components as it is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI are maintained. Please note that some figures may have been included with permission from other third parties. It is your responsibility to obtain the proper permission from the rights holder directly for these figures.

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation
  • Open Access

Tame embeddings, volume growth, and complexity of moduli spaces

Thomas W. Grimm, David Prieto, and Mick van Vliet

  • Institute for Theoretical Physics, Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CC Utrecht, The Netherlands

Phys. Rev. D 112, 106015 – Published 24 November, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/d51c-j1s9

Abstract

Quantum gravity is expected to impose constraints on the moduli spaces of massless fields that can arise in effective quantum field theories. A recent proposal asserts that the asymptotic volume growth of these spaces is severely restricted, and related to the existence of duality symmetries. In this work we link this proposal to a tameness criterion, by suggesting that any consistent moduli space should admit a tame isometric embedding into Euclidean space. This allows us to promote the volume growth constraint to a local condition, and give the growth coefficient a geometric interpretation in terms of complexity. We study the implications of this proposal for the emergence of dualities, as well as for the curvature and infinite distance limits of moduli spaces.

View figure in article

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Article Text

References (45)

  1. C. Vafa, The string landscape and the swampland, arXiv:hep-th/0509212.
  2. N. Arkani-Hamed, L. Motl, A. Nicolis, and C. Vafa, The string landscape, black holes and gravity as the weakest force, J. High Energy Phys. 06 (2007) 060.
  3. T. Banks and N. Seiberg, Symmetries and strings in field theory and gravity, Phys. Rev. D 83, 084019 (2011).
  4. H. Ooguri and C. Vafa, On the geometry of the string landscape and the swampland, Nucl. Phys. B766, 21 (2007).
  5. M. R. Douglas, The statistics of string / M theory vacua, J. High Energy Phys. 05 (2003) 046.
  6. B. S. Acharya and M. R. Douglas, A finite landscape?, arXiv:hep-th/0606212.
  7. Y. Hamada, M. Montero, C. Vafa, and I. Valenzuela, Finiteness and the swampland, J. Phys. A 55, 224005 (2022).
  8. T. W. Grimm, Taming the landscape of effective theories, J. High Energy Phys. 11 (2022) 003.
  9. M. R. Douglas, T. W. Grimm, and L. Schlechter, The tameness of quantum field theory: Part I—Amplitudes, Adv. Theor. Math. Phys. 28, 2603 (2024).
  10. M. R. Douglas, T. W. Grimm, and L. Schlechter, The tameness of quantum field theory: Part II—Structures and CFTs, arXiv:2302.04275.
  11. B. Bakker, T. W. Grimm, C. Schnell, and J. Tsimerman, Finiteness for self-dual classes in integral variations of Hodge structure, arXiv:2112.06995.
  12. T. W. Grimm and J. Monnee, Finiteness theorems and counting conjectures for the flux landscape, J. High Energy Phys. 08 (2024) 039.
  13. T. W. Grimm, S. Lanza, and C. Li, Tameness, strings, and the distance conjecture, J. High Energy Phys. 09 (2022) 149.
  14. T. W. Grimm, L. Schlechter, and M. van Vliet, Complexity in tame quantum theories, J. High Energy Phys. 05 (2024) 001.
  15. T. W. Grimm and M. van Vliet, On the complexity of quantum field theory, arXiv:2410.23338.
  16. M. Delgado, D. van de Heisteeg, S. Raman, E. Torres, C. Vafa, and K. Xu, Finiteness and the emergence of dualities, arXiv:2412.03640.
  17. Z. Lu and X. Sun, On the Weil-Petersson volume and the first Chern class of the moduli space of Calabi-Yau manifolds, Commun. Math. Phys. 261, 297 (2006).
  18. L. Van den Dries, Tame Topology and o-Minimal Structures (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1998), Vol. 248.
  19. Y. Yomdin and G. Comte, Tame Geometry with Application in Smooth Analysis (Springer, New York, 2004).
  20. G. Binyamini, D. Novikov, and B. Zack, Sharply o-minimal structures and sharp cellular decomposition, arXiv:2209.10972.
  21. G. Binyamini and D. Novikov, Tameness in geometry and arithmetic: Beyond o-minimality, in International Congress of Mathematicians (2023), pp. 1440–1461.
  22. A. M. Gabrielov, Projections of semi-analytic sets, Funct. Anal. Appl. 2, 282 (1968).
  23. J. Nash, The imbedding problem for Riemannian manifolds, Ann. Math. 63, 20 (1956).
  24. R. Bianconi and R. Figueiredo, O-minimal de Rham cohomology, arXiv:1904.05485.
  25. D. Blanuša, Über die Einbettung hyperbolischer Räume in euklidische Räume, Monatshefte fur Mathematik 59, 217 (1955).
  26. F. Bonahon, Low-Dimensional Geometry: From Euclidean Surfaces to Hyperbolic Knots (American Mathematical Society, Providence, 2009), Vol. 49.
  27. Y. Peterzil and S. Starchenko, Uniform definability of the Weierstrass ℘ functions and generalized tori of dimension one, Selecta Math.(NS) 10, 525 (2004).
  28. Let Γ be a discrete subgroup of SL(2,R). A point τ∈H is an elliptic point if it is a fixed point of an element γ∈Γ with |Tr(γ)|<2.

  29. B. Bakker, B. Klingler, and J. Tsimerman, Tame topology of arithmetic quotients and algebraicity of hodge loci, J. Am. Math. Soc. 33, 917 (2020).
  30. F. Fontenele and F. Xavier, On the complexity of isometric immersions of hyperbolic spaces in any codimension, arXiv:1410.8465.
  31. J. Voight, Quaternion Algebras (Springer Nature, Cham, 2021).
  32. G. Dvali, Black holes and large N species solution to the hierarchy problem, Fortschr. Phys. 58, 528 (2010).
  33. G. Dvali and M. Redi, Black hole bound on the number of species and quantum gravity at LHC, Phys. Rev. D 77, 045027 (2008).
  34. G. Dvali and D. Lust, Evaporation of microscopic black holes in string theory and the bound on species, Fortschr. Phys. 58, 505 (2010).
  35. A. Castellano, A. Herráez, and L. E. Ibáñez, IR/UV mixing, towers of species and swampland conjectures, J. High Energy Phys. 08 (2022) 217.
  36. D. van de Heisteeg, C. Vafa, M. Wiesner, and D. H. Wu, Moduli-dependent species scale, Beijing J. Pure Appl. Math. 1, 1 (2024).
  37. S. Raman and C. Vafa, Swampland and the geometry of marked moduli spaces, arXiv:2405.11611.
  38. L. van den Dries and C. Miller, On the real exponential field with restricted analytic functions, Isr. J. Math. 85, 19 (1994).
  39. R. E. Greene and H. Jacobowitz, Analytic isometric embeddings, Ann. Math. 93, 189 (1971).
  40. F. Marchesano, L. Melotti, and L. Paoloni, On the moduli space curvature at infinity, J. High Energy Phys. 02 (2024) 103.
  41. F. Marchesano, L. Melotti, and M. Wiesner, Asymptotic curvature divergences and non-gravitational theories, J. High Energy Phys. 02 (2025) 151.
  42. A. Castellano, F. Marchesano, L. Melotti, and L. Paoloni, The moduli space curvature and the weak gravity conjecture, arXiv:2410.10966.
  43. J. Calderón-Infante, A. Castellano, A. Herráez, and L. E. Ibáñez, Entropy bounds and the species scale distance conjecture, J. High Energy Phys. 01 (2024) 039.
  44. A. A. Borisenko, Isometric immersions of space forms into Riemannian and pseudo-Riemannian spaces of constant curvature, Russ. Math. Surv. 56, 425 (2001).
  45. A. Borel and L. Ji, Compactifications of symmetric and locally symmetric spaces, in Lie Theory: Unitary Representations and Compactifications of Symmetric Spaces (Springer, New York, 2006), pp. 69–137.

Outline

Information

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation