arXiv subjects

Sylvain Fichet

Publications and source records attributed to Sylvain Fichet.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

$N$-Photon Amplitudes in EFT from Recursion Relations and Effective Vertices

We present a recursive framework for computing arbitrary tree-level helicity amplitudes in the general effective field theory (EFT) of electromagnetism. We show that photon amplitudes can be constructed using a CSW-like recursion, whose building blocks consist of purely local subamplitudes. For a fixed number of external legs, only a finite number of these contact amplitudes need to be computed, and these admit compact expressions in terms of Hafnians. We further show that the contact amplitudes are encoded in an effective contact Lagrangian, that can be computed systematically from the general EFT Lagrangian using a suitable generating functional. We provide this contact Lagrangian up to $N=14$ photons. We argue that the contact Lagrangian reveals the hidden simplicity of helicity-conserving amplitudes, providing a simple proof of the equivalence between off-shell electromagnetic duality and helicity conservation. We further show how to resum the contact Lagrangian of a helicity-conserving theory to all $N$, and illustrate the procedure for Born-Infeld (BI) electromagnetism. Building on these methods and results, we compute the complete 6-point and 8-point tree-level helicity amplitudes generated by generic EFT operators, and the tree amplitudes up to 10-point in BI electromagnetism.

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arXiv2026

Stable Black Strings from Warped Backgrounds

We show that spacetime curvature alone can classically stabilize black strings. Working within a consistent five-dimensional dilaton-gravity system with a flat brane, we find that sufficiently large black strings are classically stable when they extend from the brane to a timelike boundary, which may be either regular or conformal. Black strings are also classically stable in the critical case of the linear dilaton spacetime. In some of the curved backgrounds considered, black strings are stable despite having infinite horizon area.

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arXiv2026

Holographic Dark Matter

Cold dark matter may be a fluid (or plasma) residing in a strongly-interacting hidden sector, rather than a population of weakly-coupled particles. Such a scenario admits a holographic description in terms of a cosmological braneworld embedded in the linear dilaton five-dimensional (5D) spacetime. In this framework, dark matter originates from the linear dilaton bulk black hole, whose phase we show to be thermodynamically favored at all temperatures. We present a natural freeze-in mechanism for the production of holographic dark matter, in which the bulk black hole is fed by energy leaking from the brane after inflation. Our model is characterized by two free parameters, one of which, the position of the black hole horizon, is fixed by the observed dark matter abundance. The remaining parameter, the 5D Planck scale $M_5$, is consistent with all current experimental bounds provided that $M_5\gtrsim 3\times 10^5$ TeV.

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arXiv2026

Running Love Numbers of Charged Black Holes

Loops of virtual particles from the vacuum of quantum field theory (QFT) render black holes tidally deformable. We compute the static tidal response of unspinning charged black holes at arbitrary radius, using the perturbative formalism developed in 2501.18684. Since the gravitational and electromagnetic tidal responses mix, we generalize the notion of Love numbers to Love matrices. We derive the coupled equations of motion for the metric and electromagnetic fluctuations around purely electric and magnetic backgrounds. For large charged black holes, which are described by the Effective Field Theory (EFT) of gravity, we compute the full set of Love matrices induced by an arbitrary tower of $F^{2n}$ operators. We find that, although quantum corrections break electromagnetic duality, the Love matrices in electric and magnetic backgrounds are related by a $Z_2$ symmetry under electric-magnetic exchange. Going beyond EFT, we compute the Love matrices of small magnetic black holes. We show that the running of the Love matrices is governed by the running of the $U(1)$ gauge coupling, and we derive the correspondence between Love and $U(1)$ beta functions for arbitrary harmonics. The overall picture that emerges is that the QFT-induced tidal response of magnetic black holes saturates in the strong-field regime. These results imply that nearly-extremal magnetic black holes charged under an Abelian dark sector could be probed by gravitational-wave observations.

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arXiv2025

The LHC as an Axion-Photon Collider

Assuming the existence of an axion-like particle (ALP), beams of relativistic particles emit fluxes of quasi-real ALPs, analogous to the photon fluxes described by Weizs\"acker-Williams-type approximations. Consequently, ALP-ALP and ALP-photon collisions can occur at the LHC. We initiate the study of the LHC as an ALP collider, and show that ALP collisions provide competitive probes of certain ALP couplings. We show that ALP fluxes from heavy ions are suppressed relative to those from protons, unlike their photon counterpart. As a result, the most likely processes are ALP-photon collisions occurring in the proton-ion ($p$A) ultraperipheral collisions. Using our implementation of ALP fluxes in simulation tools, we show that ALP-photon collisions in $p$Pb efficiently probe ALP couplings to third generation fermions. LHC data with realistic $p$Pb luminosity can constrain the product of ALP couplings to nucleons and top quarks at the level of $O(0.01$ TeV$^{-1})$. Notably, ALP-photon collisions naturally provide the leading probe of ALP flavor-violating couplings to the top quark. We suggest that the 2016 $p$Pb dataset collected at CMS, ATLAS, and LHCb should be explored for evidence of such collisions.

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arXiv2025

Vortex Fractional Fermion Number through Heat Kernel methods and Edge States

Computing the vacuum expectation of fermion number operator on a soliton background is often challenging. A recent proposal in arXiv:2305.13606 simplifies this task by considering the soliton in a bounded region and relating the $\eta$ invariant, and thus the fermion number, to a specific heat kernel coefficient and to contributions from the edge states. We test this method in a system of charged fermions living on an Abrikosov-Nielsen-Olesen (ANO) vortex background. We show that the resulting $\eta$ invariant does not depend on boundary conditions (within a certain class), thereby supporting the validity of the method. Our analysis reveals a nontrivial feature for the fermionic spectrum in the vortex-induced Higgs phase. As a by-product, we also find that for a vortex living on a disk, the edge states carry fractional charge.

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arXiv2025

On The Black Hole Weak Gravity Conjecture and Extremality in the Strong-Field Regime

We point out that the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) implies that sufficiently small extremal black holes are necessarily in the strong-field regime of electrodynamics, and therefore probe the UV completion of the Maxwell sector. To investigate the WGC bounds arising from these small extremal black holes, we revisit black hole decay in generic field theories in asymptotically flat space. We derive a necessary and a sufficient condition for any black hole to decay, the latter amounting to a bound on the growth of charge relative to mass. We apply these conditions to extremal black holes derived in various UV completions of the Maxwell sector. We find that the Euler-Heisenberg and DBI effective actions satisfy the sufficient condition for decay, while the ModMax model fails the necessary one, rendering it incompatible with the WGC. Using the decay conditions, we show that the black hole WGC implies positivity of the $U(1)$ gauge coupling beta function. This provides an independent argument that classically stable (embedded-Abelian) colored black holes cannot exist. We also show that the black hole WGC constrains conformal hidden sector models, and is always satisfied in their AdS dual realizations.

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arXiv2025

Running Love Numbers and the Effective Field Theory of Gravity

Massive states produce higher derivative corrections to Einstein gravity in the infrared, which are encoded into operators of the Effective Field Theory (EFT) of gravity. These EFT operators modify the geometry and affect the tidal properties of black holes, either neutral or charged. A thorough analysis of the perturbative tidal deformation problem leads us to introduce a tidal Green function, which we use to derive two universal formulae that efficiently provide the constant and running Love numbers induced by the EFT. We apply these formulae to determine the tidal response of EFT-corrected non-spinning black holes induced by vector and tensor fields, reproducing existing results where available and deriving new ones. We find that neutral black hole Love numbers run classically for $l\geq 3$ while charged ones run for $l\geq2$. Insights from the Frobenius method and from EFT principles confirm that the Love number renormalization flow is a well-defined physical effect. We find that extremal black holes can have Love numbers much larger than neutral ones, up to ${\cal O}(1)$ within the EFT validity regime, and that the EFT cutoff corresponds to the exponential suppression of the Schwinger effect. We discuss the possibility of probing an Abelian dark sector through gravitational waves, considering a scenario in which dark-charged extremal black holes exist in the present-day Universe.

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arXiv2024

Entanglement Entropy and Thermal Phase Transitions from Curvature Singularities

We study holographic entanglement entropy and revisit thermodynamics and confinement in the dilaton-gravity system. Our analysis focuses on a solvable class of backgrounds that includes AdS and linear dilaton spacetimes as particular cases, with some results extended to general warped metrics. A general lesson is that the behavior of the holographic theory is tied to the bulk curvature singularities. We find that a singular background is confining if and only if i) the singularity coincides with a boundary or ii) it is the linear dilaton. In the former case, for which the singularity cuts off spacetime, we demonstrate that both entanglement entropy and thermodynamics exhibit a first order phase transition. In the linear dilaton case we find instead that both entanglement entropy and thermal phase transitions are of second order. Additionally, along the process we thoroughly derive the radion effective action at quadratic order.

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arXiv2024

Holography of Broken U(1) Symmetry

We examine the Abelian Higgs model in (d+1)-dimensional anti-de Sitter space with an ultraviolet brane. The gauge symmetry is broken by a bulk Higgs vacuum expectation value triggered on the brane. We propose two separate Goldstone boson equivalence theorems for the boundary and bulk degrees of freedom. We compute the holographic self-energy of the gauge field and show that its spectrum is either a continuum, gapped continuum, or a discretuum as a function of the Higgs bulk mass. When the Higgs has no bulk mass, the AdS isometries are unbroken. We find in that case that the dual CFT has a non-conserved U(1) current whose anomalous dimension is proportional to the square of the Higgs vacuum expectation value. When the Higgs background weakly breaks the AdS isometries, we present an adapted WKB method to solve the gauge field equations. We show that the U(1) current dimension runs logarithmically with the energy scale in accordance with a nearly-marginal U(1)-breaking deformation of the CFT.

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arXiv2024

Holography of Linear Dilaton Spacetimes from the Bottom Up

The linear dilaton background is the keystone of a string-derived holographic correspondence beyond AdS$_{d+1}$/CFT$_d$. This motivates an exploration of the $(d+1)$-dimensional linear dilaton spacetime (LD$_{d+1}$) and its holographic properties from the low-energy viewpoint. We first notice that the LD$_{d+1}$ space has simple conformal symmetries, that we use to shape an effective field theory (EFT) on the LD background. We then place a brane in the background to study holography at the level of quantum fields and gravity. We find that the holographic correlators from the EFT feature a pattern of singularities at certain kinematic thresholds. We argue that such singularities can be used to bootstrap the putative $d$-dimensional dual theory using techniques analogous to those of the Cosmological Bootstrap program. Turning on finite temperature, we study the holographic fluid emerging on the brane in the presence of a bulk black hole. We find that the holographic fluid is pressureless for any $d$ due to a cancellation between Weyl curvature and dilaton stress tensor, and verify consistency with the time evolution of the theory. From the fluid thermodynamics, we find a universal temperature and Hagedorn behavior for any $d$. This matches the properties of a CFT$_2$ with large $T\overline T$ deformation, and of little string theory for $d=6$. Both the fluid equation of state and the spectrum of quantum fluctuations suggest that the $d$-dimensional dual theory arising from LD$_{d+1}$ is generically gapped.

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arXiv2024

Casimir Forces in CFT with Defects and Boundaries

We investigate the quantum forces occurring between the defects and/or boundaries of a conformal field theory (CFT). We propose to model imperfect defects and boundaries as localized relevant double-trace operators that deform the CFT. Our focus is on pointlike and codimension-one planar defects. In the case of two parallel membranes, we point out that the CFT 2-point function tends to get confined and develops a tower of resonances with constant decay rate when the operator dimension approaches the free field dimension. Using a functional formalism, we compute the quantum forces induced by the CFT between a variety of configurations of pointlike defects, infinite plates and membranes. Consistency arguments imply that these quantum forces are attractive at any distance. Forces of Casimir-Polder type appear in the UV, while forces of Casimir type appear in the IR, in which case the CFT gets repelled from the defects. Most of the forces behave as a non-integer power of the separation, controlled by the dimension of the double-trace deformation. In the Casimir regime of the membrane-membrane configuration, the quantum pressure behaves universally as $1/\ell^d$, however information about the double-trace nature of the defects still remains encoded in the strength of the pressure.

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arXiv2024

Gravity-Induced Photon Interactions and Infrared Consistency in any Dimensions

We compute the four-photon ($F^4$) operators generated by loops of charged particles of spin $0$, $\frac{1}{2}$, $1$ in the presence of gravity and in any spacetime dimension $d$. To this end, we expand the one-loop effective action via the heat kernel coefficients, which capture both the gravity-induced renormalization of the $F^4$ operators and the low-energy Einstein-Maxwell effective field theory (EFT) produced by massive charged particles. We set positivity bounds on the $F^4$ operators using standard arguments from extremal black holes (for $d\geq 4$) and from infrared (IR) consistency of four-photon scattering (for $d\geq 3$). We find that both approaches yield nearly equivalent results, even though in the amplitudes we discard the graviton $t$-channel pole and use the vanishing of the Gauss-Bonnet term at quadratic order for any $d$. The positivity bounds constrain the charge-to-mass ratio of the heavy particles. If the Planckian $F^4$ operators are sufficiently small or negative, such bounds produce a version of the $d$-dimensional Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) in most, but not all, dimensions. In the special case of $d=6$, the gravity-induced beta functions of $F^4$ operators from charged particles of any spin are positive, leading to WGC-like bounds with a logarithmic enhancement. In $d=9,10$, the WGC fails to guarantee extremal black hole decay in the infrared EFT, thereby requiring the existence of sufficiently large Planckian $F^4$ operators.

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arXiv2024

Background-Induced Forces from Dark Relics

Light particles quadratically coupled to nucleons induce macroscopic forces in matter. While a quantum effect always exists, an additional force occurs in the presence of a finite density of the light particles. We compute and classify such background-induced forces for particles of spin $0,\frac{1}{2},1$ in the framework of effective field theory. We show that, at short distance, the background-induced forces exhibit a universal behavior that depends solely on the moments of the phase space distribution function of the light particles. We compute the forces in the case of dark particles densities that may realistically occur in cosmology, assuming either cosmically homogeneous or virialized phase space distributions. For homogeneous distributions -- analogous to cosmic neutrinos, all the background-induced forces remain, unlike the quantum ones, exponentially unsuppressed at large distance, implying that large scale fifth force experiments are highly sensitive to dark relics. Moreover at zero mass the forces from dark bosons are generically enhanced with respect to their quantum counterpart due to Bose-Einstein distribution. Overall, we find that the resulting fifth force bounds can compete with those from quantum forces. For virialized distributions -- identifiable as cold dark matter, the reach is also enhanced beyond the dark matter Compton wavelength. We obtain significant bounds on sub-keV scalar cold dark matter, that can appear in certain cosmological scenarios. A thorough adaptation of the results from the E\"ot-Wash experiment may produce powerful additional bounds.

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arXiv2023

Holographic Fluids from 5D Dilaton Gravity

We study a solvable class of five-dimensional dilaton gravity models that continuously interpolate between anti-de Sitter (AdS$_5$), linear dilaton (LD$_5$) and positively curved spacetimes as a function of a continuous parameter $\nu$. The dilaton vacuum expectation value is set by a potential localized on a flat brane. We chart the elementary properties of these backgrounds for any admissible $\nu$, and determine stability conditions of the brane-dilaton system. We find that the spectrum of metric fluctuations can be either continuous or discrete. It features a massless graviton mode confined between the brane and the curvature singularity, and a massive radion mode tied to brane-dilaton stability. We show that, in the presence of a bulk black hole, the holographic theory living on the brane features a perfect fluid. The equation of state of the holographic fluid interpolates between radiation, pressureless matter and vacuum energy as a function of $\nu$. This extends earlier findings on holographic fluids. Our results suggest that the thermodynamics of the fluid mirrors precisely the thermodynamics of the bulk black hole.

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arXiv2023

Dressing in AdS and a Conformal Bethe-Salpeter Equation

We initiate the study of Dyson equations of perturbative QFT in AdS and their consequences for large-N CFT. We show that the dressed one-particle AdS propagator features wavefunction renormalization and operator mixing, giving rise to finite corrections to OPE data. We show how the resummation of 1/N effects in the CFT emerges from the dressing in AdS. When a boundary-to-bulk propagator is dressed by propagators whose sum of conformal dimensions is lower than the main dimension, it cannot map onto a CFT source; we relate this to an AdS/CFT version of particle instability. We investigate the dressing of the two-particle propagator and obtain a conformal Bethe-Salpeter equation for the conformal partial wave of a "bound state" operator. We provide a self-contained calculation for the case of a ladder kernel. We show that a bound state with conformal dimension equal to the sum of its constituents plus a 1/N^2-suppressed "binding energy" emerges. Resummation of the Dyson equations is essential for deriving these results.

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arXiv2023

Scalar-Mediated Quantum Forces Between Macroscopic Bodies and Interferometry

We study the quantum force between classical objects mediated by massive scalar fields bilinearly coupled to matter. The existence of such fields is motivated by dark matter, dark energy, and by the possibility of a hidden sector beyond the Standard Model. We introduce the quantum work felt by an arbitrary (either rigid or deformable) classical body in the presence of the scalar and show that it is finite upon requiring conservation of matter. As an example, we explicitly show that the quantum pressure inside a Dirichlet sphere is finite -- up to renormalizable divergences. Inside the bodies the scalar acquires an effective mass, leading to a behaviour for the quantum force which, in the case of rigid bodies, is reminiscent of the transition between the Casimir and Casimir-Polder forces. With this method we compute the scalar-induced quantum force in simple planar geometries. In plane-point geometry we show how to compute the contribution of the quantum force to the phase shift observable in atom interferometers. We show that atom interferometry is likely to become a competitive search method for light particles bilinearly coupled to matter, provided that the interferometer arms have lengths below ~10 cm.

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arXiv2023

Cosmological Dark Matter from a Bulk Black Hole

We study the cosmology of a three-brane in a specific five-dimensional scalar-gravity (i.e. soft-wall) background, known as the linear dilaton background. We discover that the Friedmann equation of the brane-world automatically contains a term mimicking pressureless matter. We propose to identify this term as dark matter. This dark matter arises as a projection of the bulk black hole on the brane, which contributes to the brane Friedmann equation via both the Weyl tensor and the scalar stress tensor. The nontrivial matter-like behavior is due to an exact cancellation between the Weyl and scalar pressures. We show that the Newtonian potential only receives a mild short-distance correction going as inverse distance squared, ensuring compatibility of the linear dilaton brane-world with observed 4D gravity. Our setup can be viewed as a consistent cosmological description of the holographic theories arising in the linear dilaton background. We also present more general scalar-gravity models where the brane cosmology features an effective energy density whose behavior smoothly interpolates between dark radiation, dark matter and dark energy depending on a model parameter.

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