Related papers: A Wrinkle in Coleman - De Luccia

We examine some novel physical consequences of the general structure of moduli spaces of string vacua. These include (1) finiteness of the volume of the moduli space and (2) chaotic motion of the moduli in the early universe. To fix ideas…

I provide some simple physical arguments that, once gravitation and some subtleties are taken into account, rather broad classes of potentials result in instantons which tunnel relatively rapidly between perturbatively stable minima. In…

We consider free massive matter fields in static scalar, electric and gravitational backgrounds. Tuning these backgrounds to the brink of vacuum decay, we identify a term in their effective action that is singular. This singular term is…

We discuss the appearance at the QCD phase transition, and the subsequent decay, of axion walls bounded by strings in N=1 axion models. We argue on intuitive grounds that the main decay mechanism is into barely relativistic axions. We…

Cosmic strings are the most popular topological defects arising from the spontaneous breaking of fundamental symmetries in the early Universe. They are the source of a number of interesting effects in cosmology and astrophysics. An…

This paper revisits the problem of the string decay contribution to the axion cosmological energy density. We show that this contribution is proportional to the average relative increase when axion strings decay of a certain quantity…

String-loop effects may generate very weak matter couplings for a (massless) dilaton. We examine limits on the shift of such a dilaton toward its present equilibrium value from big-bang nucleosynthesis and the binary pulsar. On the other…

In this paper we investigate the vacuum polarization effect associated with a quantum massive scalar field in a higher dimensional de Sitter spacetime in the presence of a cosmic string. Because this investigation has been developed in a…

We describe the detailed study and results of high-resolution numerical simulations of string-induced structure formation in open universes and those with a non-zero cosmological constant. The effect from small loops generated from the…

We investigate mechanisms that can trigger supersymmetry breaking in open string vacua. The focus is on backgrounds with D-branes and orientifold planes that have an exact string description, and allow to study some of the quantum effects…

Motivated by recent discussions of the string-theory landscape, we propose field-theoretic realizations of models with large numbers of vacua. These models contain multiple U(1) gauge groups, and can be interpreted as deconstructed versions…

We argue that a generic instability afflicts vacua that arise in theories whose moduli space has large dimension. Specifically, by studying theories with multiple scalar fields we provide numerical evidence that for a generic local minimum…

We study the effect of the Gauss-Bonnet term on vacuum decay process in the Coleman-De Luccia formalism. The Gauss-Bonnet term has an exponential coupling with the real scalar field, which appears in the low energy effective action of…

The string theory landscape consists of many metastable de Sitter vacua, populated by eternal inflation. Tunneling between these vacua gives rise to a dynamical system, which asymptotically settles down to an equilibrium state. We…

We argue that in the context of string theory a large number N of connected degenerate vacua that mix will lead to a ground state with much lower energy, essentially because of the standard level repulsion of quantum theory for the…

We present new solutions of vacuum decay in non-Minkowski spacetimes. On a de Sitter background, the tunneling between vacuum states with a nonvanishing energy difference has been considered, whereas in the special case of degenerate vacua…

In the colour string model the impact of string percolation on multiplicities, their long-range correlations and average transverse momentum is studied. The multiplicities are shown to be damped by a simple factor which follows from the…

We provide evidence that some four-dimensional N=1 string vacua with different numbers of generations are connected through phase transitions. The transitions involve going through a point in moduli space where there is a nontrivial fixed…

If a theory has more than one classically stable vacuum, quantum tunneling and thermal jumps make the transition between the vacua possible. The transition happens through a first order phase transition started by nucleation of a bubble of…

A strongly-coupled sector can feature a supercooled confinement transition in the early universe. We point out that, when fundamental quanta of the strong sector are swept into expanding bubbles of the confined phase, the distance between…