Conference

I discuss the basic model of Higgs inflation, with a large non-minimal curvature coupling, from the point of view of effective field theory. It is pointed out that the effective cutoff scale is uncomfortably low compared to the inflation scale, thus rendering these models extremely sensitive to the details of the ultraviolet completion.

The holographic duality gives a one-to-one mapping between consistent theories of gravity with AdS_d ground state, and conformal field theories in d-1 dimensions. Since the latter are unambiguously well-defined, we can use their defining properties to prove rigorous, model-independent theorems covering all quantum gravity theories with negative cosmological constant. Taking d=3, I will prove in this talk that every two-dimensional CFT contains a primary perator of weight less than C /12 + 0.473695, where C is the sum of right- and left-moving central charges. Using the AdS/CFT dictionary, this establishes that every theory of quantum gravity in asymptotically AdS space contains some state of mass less than 1 / (4 G), above and beyond the universal sector of boundary metric excitations.