Photon Masses in the Landscape and the Swampland

TL;DR

This paper argues that quantum gravity constrains the mass of spin-1 vector bosons, such as photons, implying they cannot have arbitrarily small St"uckelberg masses and must be exactly massless in the Standard Model.

Contribution

It establishes a quantum gravity constraint on small St"uckelberg masses, linking the mass limit to the Swampland Distance and Weak Gravity Conjectures, and discusses implications for light dark photons.

Findings

Massless photon is required by quantum gravity constraints.

Light dark photon parameter space is limited to Higgs mass generation.

Quantum gravity sets an energy cutoff depending on the vector boson mass and coupling.

Abstract

In effective quantum field theory, a spin-1 vector boson can have a technically natural small mass that does not originate from the Higgs mechanism. For such theories, which may be written in St\"uckelberg form, there is no point in field space at which the mass is exactly zero. I argue that quantum gravity differs from, and constrains, effective field theory: arbitrarily small St\"uckelberg masses are forbidden. In particular, the limit in which the mass goes to zero lies at infinite distance in field space, and this distance is correlated with a tower of modes becoming light according to the Swampland Distance Conjecture. Application of Tower or Sublattice variants of the Weak Gravity Conjecture makes this statement more precise: for a spin-1 vector boson with coupling constant $e$ and St\"uckelberg mass $m$, local quantum field theory breaks down at energies at or below $\Lambda_{\rm UV} = \min((m M_{\rm Pl}/e)^{1/2}, e^{1/3} M_{\rm Pl})$. Combined with phenomenological constraints, this argument implies that the Standard Model photon must be exactly massless. It also implies that much of the parameter space for light dark photons, which are the target of many experimental searches, is compatible only with Higgs and not St\"uckelberg mass terms. This significantly affects the experimental limits and cosmological histories of such theories. I explain various caveats and weak points of the arguments, including loopholes that could be targets for model-building.