Related papers: QCD landscape?
Compactifications of type II theories on Calabi-Yau threefolds including electric and magnetic background fluxes are discussed. We derive the bosonic part of the four-dimensional low energy effective action and show that it is a…
Recently, it has become clear that neighboring multiple vacua might have interesting consequences for the physics of the early universe. In this paper we investigate the topography of the string landscape corresponding to complex structure…
We argue that vacua of string theory which asymptote at weak coupling to linear dilaton backgrounds are holographic. The full string theory in such vacua is ``dual'' to a theory without gravity in fewer dimensions. The dual theory is…
A consistent theoretical description of physics at high energies requires an assessment of vacuum stability in either the Standard Model or any extension of it. Especially supersymmetric extensions allow for several vacua and the choice of…
Generalized global symmetries are a common feature of many quantum field theories decoupled from gravity. By contrast, in quantum gravity / the Swampland program, it is widely expected that all global symmetries are either gauged or broken,…
Understanding transitions between different vacua of a multiverse allowing eternal inflation is an open problem whose resolution is important to gain insights on the global structure of the spacetime as well as the problem of measure. In…
In Calabi-Yau fourfold compactifications of M-theory with flux, we investigate the possibility of partial supersymmetry breaking in the three-dimensional effective theory. To this end, we place the effective theory in the framework of…
I give a critical review of the holographic hypothesis, which posits that a universe with gravity can be described by a quantum field theory in fewer dimensions. I first recall how the idea originated from considerations on black hole…
The global symmetry data of a $D$-dimensional absolute quantum field theory can sometimes be packaged in terms of a $(D+1)$-dimensional bulk system obtained by extending along an interval, with a relative QFT$_D$ at one end and suitable…
According to Two-Time Physics, there is more to space-time than can be garnered with the ordinary formulation of physics. Two-Time Physics has shown that the Standard Model of Particles and Forces is successfully reproduced by a two-time…
We study deformations of N=1 supersymmetric QCD that exhibit a rich landscape of supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric vacua.
It has been recently argued that an embedding of the SM into a consistent theory of quantum gravity may imply important constraints on the mass of the lightest neutrino and the cosmological constant $\Lambda_{4}$. The constraints come from…
In this work we compare different descriptions of the space of vacua of certain three dimensional N=4 superconformal field theories, compactified on a circle and mass-deformed to N=2 in a canonical way. The original N=4 theories are known…
Motivated by the electroweak hierarchy problem, we consider theories with two extra dimensions in which the four-dimensional scalar fields are components of gauge boson in full space, namely the Gauge-Higgs unification framework. We briefly…
In supersymmetric models with the run-away vacua or with the stable but non-supersymmetric ground state there exist stable field configurations (vacua) which restore one half of supersymmetry and are characterized by constant positive…
In this brief review we discuss the viability of a multidimensional geometrical theory with one compactified dimension. We discuss the case of a Kaluza Klein fifth dimensional theory, addressing the problem by an overview of the…
Some N=1 gauge theories, including SQED and N_F=1 SQCD have the property that, for arbitrary superpotentials, all stationary points of the potential V = F+D are D-flat. For others, stationary points of V are complex gauge transformationss…
We argue that the vast majority of flux vacua with small cosmological constant are unstable to rapid decay to a big crunch. Exceptions are states with large compactification volume and supersymmetric and approximately supersymmetric states.…
Gauging isometries of four-dimensional N=2 supergravity theories yields an N=2 supersymmetric theory with a scalar potential. In this note, we study the well-known constraints for four-dimensional N=2 Minkowski vacua of such theories. We…
The plethora of scalar fields participating in the formulation of a softly broken supersymmetric theory can threat the stability of the standard vacuum. The generic situation is twofold. Directions in scalar field space may exist along…