Related papers: Life on moduli space?
Motivated also by recent revival of interest about metastable string states (as cosmic strings or in accelerator physics), we study the decay, in presence of dimensional compactification, of a particular superstring state, which was proven…
The space of four dimensional string and $M$ theory vacua with non-Abelian gauge symmetry, chiral fermions and unbroken supersymmetry beyond the electroweak scale appears to be a disconnected space whose different components represent…
Exact string solutions are presented, where moduli fields are varying with time. They provide examples where a dynamical change of the topology of space is occurring. Some other solutions give cosmological examples where some dimensions are…
Exact string solutions are presented, where moduli fields are varying with time. They provide examples where a dynamical change of the topology of space is occurring. Some other solutions give cosmological examples where some dimensions are…
The existence of life is one of the most fundamental problems of astrophysics. The intriguing existence of progressively complex and apparently improbable living beings should be a general tendency of life in the Universe. We are looking…
In this note we perform a synopsis of the life-times from vacuum decay of several de Sitter vacuum constructions in string/M-theory which have a single dS minimum arising from lifting a pre-existing AdS extremum and no other local minima…
The landscape of string vacua is very large, but generally expected to be finite in size. Enumerating the number and properties of the vacua is an important task for both the landscape and the swampland, in part to gain a deeper…
Cosmic (super)strings offer promising ways to test ideas about the early universe and physics at high energies. While in field theory constructions their tension is usually assumed to be constant (or at most slowly-varying), this is often…
String theory requires additional degrees of freedom to maintain world-sheet reparameterisation invariance at the quantum level. These are often interpreted as extra dimensions, beyond the 4 space-time. I discuss a class of quasi-realistic…
We study a class of flux compactifications that have all the moduli stabilised, a high (GUT) string scale and a low (TeV) gravitino mass that is generated dynamically. These non-geometric compactifications correspond to type II string…
We hypothesize that the vacuum is spontaneously shifted from the self-dual point in the moduli space, at which all dimensions are compact, and that the true vacuum results from the decompactification of the four space-time dimensions and…
We demonstrate that flux compactifications of type IIA string theory can classically stabilize all geometric moduli. For a particular orientifold background, we explicitly construct an infinite family of supersymmetric vacua with all moduli…
In gravitational theories with extra dimensions, it is argued that the existence of a positive vacuum energy generically implies catastrophic instability of our four-dimensional world. The most generic instability is a decompactification…
We start from a quantum computational principle suggested for string theory in a previous paper and discuss how it might lead to a dynamical principle implying the correct classical gravitational limit. Besides this, we briefly look at some…
The apparent observation of dark energy poses problems for string theory. In de Sitter space, or in quintessence models, one cannot define a gauge-invariant S-matrix. We argue that eternal quintessence does not arise in weakly coupled…
We outline the construction of metastable de Sitter vacua of type IIB string theory. Our starting point is highly warped IIB compactifications with nontrivial NS and RR three-form fluxes. By incorporating known corrections to the…
We review the structure of the moduli space of particular N = (2,2) superconformal field theories. We restrict attention to those of particular use in superstring compactification, namely those with central charge c = 3d for some integer d…
We use freely acting asymmetric orbifolds of type IIB string theory to construct a class of theories in four dimensions with eight supercharges. Their low energy effective field theories resemble $STU$ models, but have different duality…
In ten dimensional type II superstring, all perturbative massive states are unstable, typically with a short lifetime compared to the string scale. We find that the lifetime of the average string state of mass M has the asymptotic form T <…
String theory on $AdS_3 \times S^3 \times T^4$ has 20 moduli. We investigate how the perturbative closed string spectrum changes as we move around this moduli space in both the RR and NSNS flux backgrounds. We find that, at weak string…