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research article

Superadditivity at large charge

Cohen, Timothy  
•
Fadakar, Ipak  
•
Gomes, Andrew  
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July 9, 2025
Journal of High Energy Physics

The weak gravity conjecture has been invoked to conjecture that the dimensions of charged operators in a CFT should obey a superadditivity relation (sometimes referred to as convexity). In this paper, we study superadditivity of the operator spectrum in theories expanded about the semi-classical saddle point that dominates correlators of large charge operators. We explore this in two contexts. The first is a model with two scalar fields that carry different charges, at a non-trivial Wilson-Fisher fixed point. A careful analysis of the semi-classics for this two field model demonstrates that ‘quantum’ violations of superadditivity (those not forbidden by the conjecture) persist in the large charge regime. We then turn to study the general properties of CFTs at large charge as bottom-up EFTs. By a trial and error procedure we come up with a seemingly consistent family of examples violating the conjecture. In so doing the presence of a genuine dilaton field appears necessary. On the one hand our result demonstrates that the superadditivity conjecture cannot be proven purely on the basis of a bottom-up analysis. On the other hand, the need for a dilaton, with the corresponding infinite fine tuning, indicates the conjecture-violating EFTs are unlikely to be UV completable.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1007/jhep07(2025)113
Author(s)
Cohen, Timothy  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Fadakar, Ipak  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Gomes, Andrew  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Monin, Alexander
Rattazzi, Riccardo  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Date Issued

2025-07-09

Publisher

Springer

Published in
Journal of High Energy Physics
Volume

2025

Issue

7

Article Number

113

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LPTP  
Available on Infoscience
July 14, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/252226
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