Related papers: A Naturally Light Dilaton and a Small Cosmological…
The purpose of this study is to describe a perfect fluid matter distribution that leads to a constant curvature region, thanks to the effect of a non-minimal coupling. This distribution exhibits a density profile within the range found in…
Deformations of conventional solids are described via elasticity, a classical field theory whose form is constrained by translational and rotational symmetries. However, flexible metamaterials often contain an additional approximate…
In the superconformal formulation of supergravity, the standard supergravity action appears as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking when the conformal compensator scalar field, the conformon, acquires a nonzero value, giving rise to…
We study a simple holographic model for gauge theories near the conformal edge to show that the dilaton can be parametrically lighter than any other composite states. The masses of all composite states, except the Nambu-Goldstone bosons…
The scalar field is quantized in the discretized light-front framework following the {\em standard} Dirac procedure and its infinite volume limit taken. The background field and the nonzero mode variables do not commute for finite volume;…
The cosmological constant problem is a failure of naturalness and suggests that a fine-tuning mechanism is at work, which may also address the hierarchy problem. An example -- supported by Weinberg's successful prediction of the…
We analyze newly expanded and refined data from lattice studies of an SU(3) gauge theory with eight Dirac fermions in the fundamental representation. We focus on the light composite states emerging from these studies, consisting of a set of…
We show that if there is a realistic 4-d string, the dilaton and moduli supermultiplets will generically acquire a small mass O(m_{3/2}), providing the only vacuum-independent evidence of low-energy physics in string theory beyond the…
We work out the phenomenology of a model of supersymmetry breaking in the presence of a tiny (tunable) positive cosmological constant, proposed by the authors in arXiv:1403.1534. It utilises a single chiral multiplet with a gauged shift…
We present the theory describing supersymmetrical vortices in the curved superspace of the (1,0) supergravity. The action is defined as a (1,0) locally supersymmetric $SU(2)/U(1)$ coset perturbed by the cosmological constant-like term. The…
We consider the light-cone (LC) gauge and LC quantization of the dimensional reduction of super Yang Mills theory from four to two dimensions. After integrating out all unphysical degrees of freedom, the non-local LC Hamiltonian exhibits an…
The $\cal{N}=4$ supersymmetric spinning particle admits several consistent quantizations, related to the gauging of different subgroups of the $SO(4)$ $R$-symmetry on the worldline. We construct the background independent BRST quantization…
In this thesis we discuss non-perturbative phenomena emerging in gauge and in string/supergravity theories. We compute the partition function of 5D minimal supersymmetric U(1) gauge theory with extra adjoint matter in general…
We study the soft limits of cosmological correlators from a holographic perspective, showing how the inflationary consistency relations arise from the diffeomorphism invariance of the dual quantum field theory. Starting from the…
The values of the Hubble constant ($\rm{H_0}$) inferred from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and local measurements via the distance ladder exhibit a $\sim5\sigma$ tension. In this work we propose that the tension might be partially…
We consider deformations of the singular "global cosmic string" compactifications, known to naturally generate exponentially large scales. The deformations are obtained by allowing a constant curvature metric on the brane and correspond to…
The interplay between cosmology and strongly coupled dynamics can yield transient spectral features that vanish at late times, but which may leave behind phenomenological signatures in the spectrum of primordial fluctuations. Of particular…
Inspired by the fully non-linear Geodesic Light-Cone (GLC) gauge, we consider its analogous set of coordinates which describes the unperturbed Universe. Given this starting point, we then build a cosmological perturbation theory on top of…
We review various aspects of de Sitter spacetime in string theory: its status as an effective field theory spacetime solution, its relation to the vacuum energy problem in string theory, its (global) holographic definition in terms of two…
We examine the structure of soft supersymmetry breaking terms in KKLT models of flux compactification with low energy supersymmetry. Moduli are stabilized by fluxes and nonperturbative dynamics while a de Sitter vacuum is obtained by adding…