Related papers: Supergravity vacua and solitons
Gauge/gravity duality is the conjecture that string theories have dual descriptions as gauge theories. Weakly-coupled gravity is dual to strongly-coupled gauge theories, ideal for lattice calculations. I will show precision lattice…
Since Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes emit thermal radiation, black holes have become the theoretical laboratories for testing our ideas on quantum gravity. This dissertation is devoted to the study of singularities, the…
This is a write-up of introductory lectures on black holes in string theory given at TASI-99. Topics discussed include: Black holes, thermodynamics and the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, the information problem; supergravity actions, conserved…
The twentieth century has thrown up exotic concepts -- dark matter, gravity waves, Higgs Bosons, Magnetic Monopoles and so on. The sad truth is that even after several decades, these remain elusive to observation and experiment. Some are…
Perturbations of black holes, initially considered in the context of possible observations of astrophysical effects, have been studied for the past ten years in string theory, brane-world models and quantum gravity. Through the famous…
Lectures given at the Isaac Newton Institute, NATO-ASI School on "Confinement, Duality and Non-Perturbative Aspects of QCD", 23 June - 4 July, 1997.
This review discusses the current status of supermassive black hole research, as seen from a purely observational standpoint. Since the early '90s, rapid technological advances, most notably the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, the…
This is a writeup of a talk given at the Oskar Klein Centenery Symposium, Stockholm, September 19-21, 1994. It is an essay on the black hole information paradox and its connection with thermodynamics and the foundations of quantum…
After a brief introduction to the Attractor Mechanism, we review the appearance of groups of type E7 as generalized electric-magnetic duality symmetries in locally supersymmetric theories of gravity, with particular emphasis on the…
Black holes are fantastic laboratories to probe new physics. Both theoretically and experimentally, many new ideas are emerging to use them as tools for understanding better quantum gravity or classical gravity beyond general relativity. I…
We discuss properties and interpretation of recently found globally regular and black hole solutions of a Einstein-Yang-Mills-dilaton theory. Talk given at the 15th annual MRST meeting on High Energy Physics, Syracuse University, NY, May…
In the first part of this paper we find supergravity solutions corresponding to branes on worldvolumes of the form $R^d \times \Sigma$ where $\Sigma$ is a Riemann surface. These theories arise when we wrap branes on holomorphic Riemann…
Models predicting the existence of extra spatial dimensions offer compelling and novel solutions to outstanding problems of the Standard Model. In such models, our universe exists on a 4 dimensional brane embedded in a larger dimensional…
The purpose of the present thesis is to give a self-contained review of the solvable Lie algebra approach to supergravity problems related with S, T and U dualities. After recalling the general features of dualities in both Superstring…
We give a preliminary discussion of how the addition of extra coordinates in M-theory, which together with the original ones parametrise a U-fold, can serve as a tool for formulating brane dynamics with manifest U-duality. The redundant…
This is a slightly expanded version of my talk at Future Perspectives in Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, Stephen Hawking's 60th Birthday Worshop. I describe some of the issues that were important in gauged supergravity in the 1980's and…
This talk summarizes our recent work establishing an algebraic, model-independent basis for the existence of \B bounds and \B equations for topologically non-trivial solitons and instantons. Our arguments use supersymmetry in an essential…
It is shown that extremal magnetic black hole solutions of N = 2 supergravity coupled to vector multiplets $X^\Lambda$ with a generic holomorphic prepotential $F(X^\Lambda)$ can be described as supersymmetric solitons which interpolate…
In this conference published in 1997 some problems on the geodesics of a Lorentzian manifold concerning causality and infinite-dimensional variational methods, are pointed out. Even though a big progress on many of these questions have been…
We discuss the existance of smooth soliton solutions which interpolate between supersymmetric vacua in odd-dimensional theories. In particular we apply this analysis to a wide class of supergravities to argue against the existence of smooth…