Related papers: Instabilities of Twisted Strings
We review a class of non-topological defects in the standard electroweak model, and their implications. Starting with the semilocal string, which provides a counterexample to many well known properties of topological vortices, we discuss…
We review the main results of our investigations motivated by the tadpole potentials of ten-dimensional strings with broken supersymmetry. While these are at best partial indications, it is hard to resist the feeling that they do capture…
Since it has been pointed out that physics beyond the Standard Model may be constrained by gravitational waves from cosmic strings, it has been more important to clarify in what cases cosmic strings are formed. We study the stability of the…
We report on a large scale numerical study of networks of semilocal cosmic strings in flat space in the parameter regime in which they are perturbatively stable. We find a population of segments with an exponential length distribution and…
In addition to buoyancy- and magnetic tension-driven instabilities, magnetic flux rings are also susceptible to an instability induced by the hydrodynamic drag force. We investigate the influence of the toroidal shape and equilibrium…
Progress on string theory in curved spacetimes since 1992 are reviewed. After a short introduction on strings in Minkowski and curved spacetimes, we focus on strings in cosmological spacetimes. The classical behaviour of strings in FRW and…
We study flux tubes on Higgs branches with curved geometry in supersymmetric gauge theories. As a first example we consider N=1 QED with one flavor of charges and with Higgs branch curved by adding a Fayet-Iliopoulos (FI) term. We show that…
We reformulate twistor-string theory as a heterotic string based on a twisted (0,2) model. The path integral localizes on holomorphic maps, while the (0,2) moduli naturally correspond to the states of N=4 super Yang-Mills and conformal…
String scattering amplitudes in the high energy asymptotic region have been studied by saddle point approximation. Recently, it was pointed out that infinitely many complex saddles contribute to string amplitudes even at tree-level after…
We analyze a one-dimensional spin-string model, in which string oscillators are linearly coupled to their two nearest neighbors and to Ising spins representing internal degrees of freedom. String-spin coupling induces a long-range…
Exact superstring solutions are constructed in 4-D space-time, with positive curvature and non-trivial dilaton and antisymmetric tensor fields. The full spectrum of string excitations is derived as a function of moduli fields $T^{i}$ and…
Effective string theory has shown its universal power in the prediction of the spectrum of low-lying excited states of confining strings. Here we study confining flux tubes in $\mathbb{Z}_N$ gauge theories. For the $N=2$ theory, which…
We consider soliton solutions to Bekenstein's theory, for which the fine structure constant $\alpha=e^2/(4\pi\hbar c)$ is allowed to vary due to the presence of a dielectric field pervading the vacuum. More specifically we investigate the…
We discuss two types of instabilities which may arise in string theory compactified to asymptotically AdS spaces: perturbative, due to discrete modes in the spectrum of the Laplacian, and non-perturbative, due to brane nucleation. In the…
We extend our earlier work, regarding the perturbative stability of string configurations used for computing the interaction potential of heavy quarks within the gauge/gravity correspondence, to cover a more general class of gravity duals.…
We study the behaviour of the flux tube in the reconfined phase of the trace deformed $\mathrm{SU}(2)$ Yang-Mills theory in (2 + 1) dimensions. In this phase the Polyakov loop has a vanishing expectation value (and center symmetry is…
We construct, in an SU(2) gauge theory with two adjoint scalars, flux strings with monopoles attached at the ends. One scalar breaks SU(2) to U(1) and produces monopoles, the other then breaks the U(1) and produces strings. Dualizing, we…
I analyze the interplay of gauge and global symmetries in the theory of topological defects. In a two-dimensional model in which both gauge symmetries and {\it exact} global symmetries are spontaneously broken, stable vortices may fail to…
Solar wind plasma is supposed to be structured in magnetic flux tubes carried from the solar surface. Tangential velocity discontinuity near the boundaries of individual tubes may result in Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, which may contribute…
In this thesis, we study the properties of String theory amplitudes within the framework of Intersection Theory (IT) for twisted (co)homology, which, as recently proposed, offered a novel approach to analyze relations between scattering…