Related papers: Small Steps and Giant Leaps in the Landscape
There is evidence that string theory possesses a large discretuum of stable and/or metastable ground states, with zero or four supersymmetries in four dimensions. I discuss critically the nature of this evidence. Assuming this "landscape"…
We conjecture that all vacua in string theory decay. More precisely, non-supersymmetric vacua in string theory are at most metastable and eventually decay, while supersymmetric vacua are only marginally stable. All de Sitter vacua with…
Type II string theory and M-theory admit flux configurations that break supersymmetry below the Kaluza-Klein scale. These backgrounds play a central role in most models of the string landscape. I argue that the behavior of such backgrounds…
We use a field theoretic generalization of the Wigner-Weisskopf method to study the stability of the Bunch-Davies vacuum state for a massless, conformally coupled interacting test field in de Sitter space. We find that in $\lambda \phi^4$…
We consider the evolution of massive scalar fields in (asymptotically) de Sitter spacetimes of arbitrary dimension. Through the proposed dS/CFT correspondence, our analysis points to the existence of new nonlocal dualities for the Euclidean…
We construct purely non-perturbative anti-de Sitter vacua in string theory which, on uplifting to a de Sitter (dS) one, have a decay time many orders of magnitude smaller than those of standard constructions, such as the KKLT and LVS…
This paper is the fourth in a series exploring the physical consequences of the solidity of highly viscous liquids. It is argued that the two basic characteristics of a flow event (a jump between two energy minima in configuration space)…
We examine the descent via membrane nucleation through a landscape of vacua where the cosmological constant is given by a combination of four-form fluxes. It has been shown that this descent can be slowed exponentially for very low…
At very early times, the universe was not in a vacuum state. Under the assumtion that the deviation from equillibrium was large, in particular that it is higher than the scale of inflation, we analyse the conditions for local transitions…
The Ooguri-Vafa Swampland Conjectures claim that in any consistent theory of quantum gravity, when venturing to large distances in scalar field space, a tower of particles will become light at a rate that is exponential in the field space…
Field theory in de Sitter space admits a one-parameter family of vacua determined by a superselection parameter alpha. Of these vacua, the Euclidean vacuum uniquely extrapolates to the vacuum of flat Minkowski space. States which resemble…
We discuss some basic aspects of effective field theory applied to supergravity theories which arise in the low-energy limit of string theory. Our discussion is particularly relevant to the effective field theories of no-scale…
How the spacetime evolved non-perturbatively in a landscape with multiple anti-de Sitter (AdS) vacua, which is theoretically well-motivated, has always been a matter of concern. As a step towards this issue, we perform (3+1)D numerical…
We study solutions of Einstein gravity coupled to a positive cosmological constant and matter, which are asymptotically de Sitter and homogeneous. Regarded as perturbations of de Sitter space, a theorem of Gao and Wald implies that…
Recent developments in string theory have reinforced the notion that the space of stable supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric string vacua fills out a ``landscape'' whose features are largely unknown. It is then hoped that progress in…
The suggestion that there exist causally disconnected universes or sub-universes to explain the values of physical parameters such as the cosmological constant is discussed. A statistical model of the string landscape/topography is…
This article is the author's PhD thesis. After a review of string vacua obtained through compactification (with and wothout fluxes), it presents and describes various aspects of the Landscape of string vacua. At first it gives an…
We study the evolution of the cross-correlation between voids and the mass density field - i.e. of void profiles. We show that approaches based on the spherical model alone miss an important contribution to the evolution on large scales of…
When the vacuum state of a scalar or electromagnetic field is modified by the presence of a reflecting boundary, an interacting test particle undergoes velocity fluctuations. Such effect is regarded as a sort of quantum analog of the…
We consider implications of the microscopic dynamics of spacetime for the evolution of cosmological models. We argue that quantum geometry effects may lead to stochastic fluctuations of the gravitational constant, which is thus considered…