Related papers: Life on moduli space?
The current classification of $\mathcal{N} = 1$ string theories in eight and seven dimensions is completely captured by K3 surfaces with F-Theory or M-Theory frozen singularities. In this note we show that there are inequivalent ways of…
The Anthropic Principle has been with us since the 1970s. This Principle is advanced to account for the "fine tuning" of the 25 constants of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Were these constants very different, life could not exist.…
We study properties of moduli stabilization in the four dimensional N = 1 supergravity theory with heavy moduli and would-be saxion-axion multiplets including light string-theoretic axions. We give general formulation for the scenario that…
After reviewing the cosmological constant problem - why is Lambda not huge? - I outline the two basic approaches that had emerged by the late 1980s, and note that each made a clear prediction. Precision cosmological experiments now indicate…
String theory realisations of the QCD axion are often said to belong to the anthropic window where the decay constant is around the GUT scale and the initial misalignment angle has to be tuned close to zero. In this paper we revisit this…
Negative mass brane-like objects known as orientifolds are crucial in the construction of all presently understood realistic string compactifications and I review in general the link between negative energy objects and the existence of a…
Anthropic arguments in multiverse cosmology and string theory rely on the weak anthropic principle (WAP). We show that the principle, though ultimately a tautology, is nevertheless ambiguous. It can be reformulated in one of two unambiguous…
We consider grand unified theories with superconducting cosmic strings and which admit the mechanism for generating primordial magnetic fields recently discussed by Vachaspati. We show that these models are severely constrained by…
We investigate stringy constraints on moduli spaces in modular flavor models by analyzing moduli-dependent threshold corrections in heterotic string vacua. While moduli play a crucial role in determining the flavor structure of fermions…
Let $C$ be an algebraic curve of genus $g\ge2$. A coherent system on $C$ consists of a pair $(E,V)$, where $E$ is an algebraic vector bundle over $C$ of rank $n$ and degree $d$ and $V$ is a subspace of dimension $k$ of the space of sections…
We consider a conformal system of a string and a particle defined in D=10+2 space-time dimensions. The extra time-like dimension is a gauge artifact and can be eliminated by choosing a gauge in which the SO(10,1) Lorentz symmetry is…
At present we know nothing about the nature of the dark energy accounting for about 70% of the energy density of the Universe. One possibility is that the dark energy is provided by an extremely light field, the quintessence, rolling down…
It is becoming increasingly clear that metastable vacua may play a prominent role in supersymmetry-breaking. To date, however, this idea has been realized only in models where non-perturbative dynamics complicates the analysis of…
Motivated by the early discovery of the gigantic landscape of string theory vacua, in recent years people switched direction to try to find constraints on low energy effective field theories from UV-complete descriptions for example quantum…
We review applications of string theory to cosmology, from primordial times to the present-day accelerated expansion. Starting with a brief overview of cosmology and string compactifications, we discuss in detail moduli stabilisation,…
In this work we explore a model of the universe in which dark energy is modelled explicitely with both a dynamical quintessence field (with a double exponential self-interaction potential) and a cosmological constant. For a given region of…
We investigate effects of the radiation and the moduli oscillation around the stabilized values on the evolution of a 6-dimensional spacetime compactified on $S^2$. In order to see the transition from the 5-dimensional space to the…
We examine recent work on compactifications of string theory with fluxes, where effective potentials for light moduli have been derived after integrating out moduli that are assumed to be heavy at the classical level, and then adding…
Motivated by the work of Polchinski and Strominger on type IIA theory, where the effect of non-trivial field strengths for p-form potentials on a Calabi-Yau space was discussed, we study four-dimensional heterotic string theory in the…
The construction of meta-stable four-dimensional de Sitter vacua in type IIB string compactifications represents an important question and an ongoing area of work. There is considerable support both for stringy de Sitter vacua in the…