Calmet Xavier, Hsu Stephen D H, Reeb David
Catholic University of Louvain, Center for Particle Physics and Phenomenology, 2 Chemin du Cyclotron, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Phys Rev Lett. 2008 Oct 24;101(17):171802. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.171802. Epub 2008 Oct 20.
In grand unified theories with large numbers of fields, renormalization effects significantly modify the scale at which quantum gravity becomes strong. This in turn can modify the boundary conditions for coupling constant unification, if higher dimensional operators induced by gravity are taken into consideration. We show that the generic size of, and the uncertainty in, these effects from gravity can be larger than the two-loop corrections typically considered in renormalization group analyses of unification. In some cases, gravitational effects of modest size can render unification impossible.
