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The past year has seen enormous progress in string theory. It has become clear that all of the different string theories are different limits of a single theory. Moreover, in certain limits, one obtains a new, eleven-dimensional structure…
The recent proposal of theories with compactified large extra dimensions is reviewed. We pay especial attention to brane world models with low tension where the only relevant degrees of freedom at low energies are the Standard Model (SM)…
We investigate the effective worldvolume theories of branes in a background given by (the bosonic sector of) 10-dimensional massive IIA supergravity (``massive branes'') and their M-theoretic origin. In the case of the solitonic 5-brane of…
We describe a simple mechanism that can lead to inflation within string-based brane-world scenarios. The idea is to start from a supersymmetric configuration with two parallel static Dp-branes, and slightly break the supersymmetry…
We describe properties of the M-theory five-brane containing $Q$ coincident self-dual strings on its worldvolume. This is the five-brane description of Q membranes ending on the five-brane. In particular, we consider a Maldacena-like low…
A novel generalisation of the Dirac-Born-Infeld string scenario is described. It is shown that matter residing on the moving brane is dark and has the so-called disformal coupling to gravity. This gives rise to cosmologies where dark matter…
"Brane supersymmetry breaking" occurs in String Theory when the only available combinations of D-branes and orientifolds are not mutually BPS and yet do not introduce tree-level tachyon instabilities. It is characterized by the emergence of…
It is emphasized that compactified little string theories have compact moduli spaces of vacua, which globally probe compact string geometry. Compactifying various little string theories on T^3 leads to 3d theories with exact, quantum…
In a recent paper, Polchinski and Strassler found a string theory dual of a gauge theory with reduced supersymmetry. Motivated by their approach, we perturb the $\N=8$ theory living on a set of N M2 branes to $\N=2$, by adding fermion mass…
The low energy effective action of string theory depends strongly on the process of compactification and the localization of fields in extra dimensions. Explicit string constructions towards the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM)…
We construct for the first time an energy-momentum tensor for the electromagnetic field of a p-brane in arbitrary dimensions, entailing finite energy-momentum integrals. The construction relies on distribution theory and is based on a…
We compute the annulus diagram corresponding to the interaction of a fractional D3 brane with a gauge field on its world-volume and a stack of N fractional D3 branes on the orbifolds C^2 /Z_2 and C^3/Z_2 x Z_2. We show that its logarithmic…
From the perspective of four dimensional effective theory on a two brane warped geometry model, we examine the possibility of "bouncing phenomena"on our visible brane. Our results reveal that the presence of warped extra dimension lead to a…
We study the non-perturbative effects induced by stringy instantons on N=2 SU}(N) gauge theories in four dimensions, realized on fractional D3 branes in a C^3/Z_3 orientifold. The stringy instantons, corresponding to D(-1) branes that…
Exceptional Periodicity (EP) has taught us that there are families of M Theory-like superalgebras in spacetime dimensions $11,19,27,\dots$ up to infinity. In this paper, we make the conjecture that M Theory at each level of EP can be…
To understand an emergent spacetime is to understand the emergence of locality. Entanglement entropy is a powerful diagnostic of locality, because locality leads to a large amount of short distance entanglement. Two dimensional string…
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…
Using boundary states we derive the presence of (chiral) fermions on the intersection of type 0 D-branes. The corresponding anomalous couplings on the branes are then computed. Furthermore, we discuss systems of branes sitting at $A_n$…
A very large extra dimension may contain many localized branes. We discuss the possibility to formulate such models as a spin system where each spin indicates the supersymmetry direction preserved by the corresponding brane. In the…
In this lecture I will review the present status of inflation within string-based brane-world scenarios. The idea is to start from a supersymmetric configuration with two parallel static Dp-branes, and slightly break the supersymmetry…