The UV Fate of Anomalous $U(1)$s and the Swampland

Abstract

Massive $U(1)$ gauge theories featuring parametrically light vectors are suspected to belong in the Swampland of consistent EFTs that cannot be embedded into a theory of quantum gravity. We study four-dimensional, chiral $U(1)$ gauge theories that appear anomalous over a range of energies up to the scale of anomaly-cancelling massive chiral fermions. We show that such theories require to be UV-completed at a finite cutoff below which a radial mode must appear, and cannot be decoupled -- a St\"uckelberg limit does not exist. When the infrared fermion spectrum contains a mixed $U(1)$-gravitational anomaly, this class of theories provides a toy model of a boundary into the Swampland, for sufficiently small values of the vector mass. In this context, we show that the limit of a parametrically light vector comes at the cost of a quantum gravity scale that lies parametrically below $M_{Pl}$, and our result provides field theoretic evidence for the existence of a Swampland of EFTs that is disconnected from the subset of theories compatible with a gravitational UV-completion. Moreover, when the low energy theory also contains a $U(1)^3$ anomaly, the Weak Gravity Conjecture scale makes an appearance in the form of a quantum gravity cutoff for values of the gauge coupling above a certain critical size.