Implications of the Weak Gravity Conjecture on Charge, Kinetic Mixing, the Photon Mass, and More

Abstract

We investigate several phenomenological implications of the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC). We find that the WGC implies that the SM neutrinos must be electrically neutral, that the electric charge in the SM must be quantized, and that the photon must be massless. In addition, we use the WGC to set lower bounds on the electric charge of milli-charged particles (mCP), the gauge coupling of several $U(1)$ extensions of the SM, their kinetic mixing parameter with the SM $U(1{)}_{\text{EM}}$, and the axion couplings to photons and fermions. We also set an upper bound on the lifetime of the proton.

Comments: 8 pages, 3 figures; v2: typos corrected, references added