Related papers: Semiclassical decay of topological defects
The Standard Model is the low-energy limit of a microscopic theory which includes extra dimensions and new symmetries. A part of my thesis consisted in constructing a new class of models with two extra dimensions. We showed that these…
States supported by chaotic open quantum systems fall into two categories: a majority showing instantaneous ballistic decay, and a set of quantum resonances of classically vanishing support in phase space. We present a theory describing…
This essay presents a critical evaluation of the concepts of string theory and its impact on particle physics. The point of departure is a historical review of four decades of string theory within the broader context of six decades of…
In general quantum systems there are two kinds of spacetime modes, those that fluctuate and those that do not. Fluctuating modes have normalizable wavefunctions. In the context of 2D gravity and ``non-critical'' string theory these are…
Four-particle tree-level scattering amplitudes in string theory are magically consistent with unitarity, reflected in the non-trivial fact that beneath the critical dimension, the residues of the amplitudes on massive poles can be expanded…
We consider massless string scattering amplitudes in a limit where the number of external particles becomes very large, while the energy of each particle remains small. Using the growth of the volume of the relevant moduli space, and by…
A massless scalar field is quantized in the background of a spinning string with cosmic dislocation. By increasing the spin density toward the dislocation parameter, a region containing closed timelike curves (CTCs) eventually forms around…
Perturbations of a class of semiclassical strings known today as spiky strings, are studied using the well-known Jacobi equations for small normal deformations of an embedded timelike surface. It is shown that there exists finite normal…
This paper studies the decay of a large, closed domain wall in a closed universe. Such walls can form in the presence of a broken, discrete symmetry. We study a novel process of quantum decay for such a wall, in which the vacuum fluctuates…
We study k-defects - topological defects in theories with more than two derivatives and second-order equations of motion - and describe some striking ways in which these defects both resemble and differ from their analogues in canonical…
The properties of cosmic strings have been investigated in detail for their implications in early-universe cosmology. Although many variations of the basic structure have been discovered, with implications for both the microscopic and…
It has been shown that if one solves self-consistently the semiclassical Einstein equations in the presence of a quantum scalar field, with a cutoff on the number of modes, spacetime become flatter when the cutoff increases. Here we extend…
The groundstate configuration and the eigenmodes of two parallel two-dimensional classical atoms are obtained as function of the inter-atomic distance (d). The classical particles are confined by identical harmonic wells and repel each…
We consider vacuum tunneling of a new kind where the false vacua are not translationally invariant, but have topological defects that break some of their translational symmetries. In the particular case where the topological defects are…
The appearance of tracks, close to classical orbits, left by charged quantum particles propagating inside a detector, such as a cavity periodically illuminated by light pulses, is studied for a family of idealized models. In the…
We show that if there is a realistic 4-d string, the dilaton and moduli supermultiplets will generically acquire a small mass O(m_{3/2}), providing the only vacuum-independent evidence of low-energy physics in string theory beyond the…
We calculate the power spectrum of density fluctuations in the statistical non-equilibrium field theory for classical, microscopic degrees of freedom to first order in the interaction potential. We specialise our result to cosmology by…
In this paper we show how quantum corrections, although perturbatively small, may play an important role in the analysis of the existence of some classical models. This, in fact, appears to be the case of static, uniform--density models of…
The quantum and classical aspects of a deformed $c=1$ matrix model proposed by Jevicki and Yoneya are studied. String equations are formulated in the framework of Toda lattice hierarchy. The Whittaker functions now play the role of…
Some aspects of the theory of cosmological perturbations from cosmic strings and other topological defects are outlined, with particular reference to a simple example: a spatially flat CDM-dominated universe. The conserved energy-momentum…