Related papers: Forbidden territories in the string landscape
We argue for the existence of bounds on the tensions of $p$-branes in de Sitter space in terms of the Hubble rate and the strength of a class of Chern-Simons-like couplings. The world-volume couplings involve Abelian 1-form gauge fields in…
We investigate orientifold of brane tilings. We clarify how the cancellations of gauge anomaly and Witten's anomaly are guaranteed by the conservation of the D5-brane charge. We also discuss the relation between brane tilings and the dual…
Classical configurations of a M2-brane, a D2-brane and D0-branes are investigated in the background of an infinite array of M5-branes or NS5-branes. On the M2-brane, we discuss three kinds of configurations, such as a sphere, a cylinder and…
We study some wrapped configurations of branes in the near-horizon geometry of a stack of other branes. The common feature of all the cases analyzed is a quantization rule and the appearance of a finite number of static configurations in…
${\bf Z}_2\times {\bf Z}_2$ Coxeter orbifolds are constructed with the property that some twisted sectors have fixed planes for which the six-torus can not be decomposed into a direct sum ${\bf T}^2\bigoplus{\bf T}^4 $ with the fixed plane…
We study the effects of adding RR, NS and metric fluxes on a T^6/(\Omega (-1)^{F_L} I_3) Type IIA orientifold. By using the effective flux-induced superpotential we obtain Minkowski or AdS vacua with broken or unbroken supersymmetry. In the…
We consider 4d string compactifications in the presence of fluxes, and classify particles, strings and domain walls arising from wrapped branes which have charges conserved modulo an integer p, and whose annihilation is catalized by fluxes,…
In previous work, it was argued that the type IIB T^6/Z_2 orientifold with a choice of flux preserving N=2 supersymmetry is dual to a class of purely geometric type IIA compactifications on abelian surface (T^4) fibered Calabi-Yau…
We report on progress towards constructing string models incorporating both realistic D-brane matter content and moduli stabilisation with dynamical low-scale supersymmetry breaking. The general framework is that of local D-brane models…
We review the construction and phenomenology of intersecting brane worlds. The breaking of chiral and supersymmetry together with a reduction of gauge symmetry by introducing D-branes at generic angles into type I or type II string…
We study the dynamics of type I strings on Melvin backgrounds, with a single or multiple twisted two-planes. We construct two inequivalent types of orientifold models that correspond to (non-compact) irrational versions of Scherk-Schwarz…
We study global worldsheet anomalies for open strings ending on several coincident D-branes in the presence of a B-field. We show that cancellation of anomalies is made possible by a correlation between the t'Hooft magnetic flux on the…
Recent work on four dimensional effective descriptions of the heterotic string has identified the moduli of such systems as being given by kernels of maps between ordinary Dolbeault cohomology groups. The maps involved are defined by the…
We discuss the moduli space of nine dimensional N=1 supersymmetric compactifications of M theory / string theory with reduced rank (rank 10 or rank 2), exhibiting how all the different theories (including M theory compactified on a Klein…
In this review article we study type IIB superstring compactifications in the presence of space-time filling D-branes while preserving N=1 supersymmetry in the effective four-dimensional theory. This amount of unbroken supersymmetry and the…
Fluxbrane inflation is a stringy version of D-term inflation in which two fluxed D7-branes move towards each other until their (relative) gauge flux annihilates. Compared to brane-antibrane inflation, the leading-order inflationary…
Stabilizing all of the modulus fields coming from compactifications of string theory on internal manifolds is one of the outstanding challenges for string cosmology. Here, in a simple example of toroidal compactification, we study the…
We give a systematic derivation of the consistency conditions which constrain open-closed disk amplitudes of topological strings. They include the A-infinity relations (which generalize associativity of the boundary product of topological…
Recent progress in understanding modulus stabilization in string theory relies on the existence of a non-renormalization theorem for the 4D compactifications of Type IIB supergravity which preserve N=1 supersymmetry. We provide a simple…
D-branes on orbifolds with and without discrete torsion are analysed in a unified way using the boundary state formalism. For the example of the Z2 x Z2 orbifold it is found that both the theory with and without discrete torsion possess…