Sharpening the Supersymmetric Axion Weak Gravity Conjecture

Abstract

The Axion Weak Gravity Conjecture provides one of the most effective quantum gravity tools for constraining particle physics and cosmology, but it has long been thought of as a slightly fuzzy statement: given an axion with decay constant $f$ there should exist an instanton of charge $n$ and action $S$ with $fS/|n|$ at most an order-one number in Planck units. Recent work related to axion wormholes motivated a specific order-one coefficient, $\frac{fS}{|n|} \leq \fracπ{2 κ_d} \sqrt{\frac{d-1}{d-2}}$. In this work, we verify this bound in various axion sectors across the string landscape using three complementary approaches. In the process, we derive even tighter bounds on instantons in such sectors. For example, we argue that supersymmetric instantons in 4d satisfy the stronger bound of $\frac{fS}{|n|}\leq \frac 1{κ_4}\sqrt{\frac{7}{2}}$.