Related papers: String theory as a Lilliputian world
`Old' String Theory is a theory of one-dimensional extended objects, whose vibrations correspond to excitations of various target-space field modes including gravity. In these lectures I will give an introduction to low-energy Effective…
This thesis examines the interaction of both bosonic and superstrings with various backgrounds with a view to understanding the interplay between tachyon condensation and world-sheet conformal invariance, and to understanding the overlap of…
String theory axions appear to be promising candidates for explaining cosmological constant via quintessence. In this paper, we study conditions on the string compactifications under which axion quintessence can happen. For sufficiently…
Starting with exact solutions to string theory on curved spacetimes we obtain deformations that represent gravitational shock waves. These may exist in the presence or absence of sources. Sources are effectively induced by a tachyon field…
Liouville string theory is a natural framework for discussing the non-equilibrium evolution of the Universe. It enables non-critical strings to be treated in mathematically consistent manner, in which target time is identified with a…
The study of open string tachyon condensation in string field theory can be drastically simplified by making an appropriate choice of coordinates on the space of string fields. We show that a very natural coordinate system is suggested by…
The nature of duality symmetries is explored in closed bosonic string theory, particularly in the case of a four-dimensional target space admitting a one-parameter isometry. It appears that the S-duality of string theory behaves analogously…
Models with large extra dimensions offer the possibility of the Planck scale being of order the electroweak scale, thus alleviating the gauge hierarchy problem. We show that these models suffer from a breakdown of unitarity at around three…
We investigate the field theory of strings having as a target space an arbitrary discrete one-dimensional manifold. The existence of the continuum limit is guaranteed if the target space is a Dynkin diagram of a simply laced Lie algebra or…
We present results of new field-theoretic simulation of cosmological axion strings, which are eight times longer than previous ones. We have upgraded our simulation of physical strings in Hiramatsu et al. (2011) in terms of the number of…
It is generally accepted that the double-scaled 1D matrix model is equivalent to the $c=1$ string theory with tachyon condensation. There remain however puzzles that are to be clarified in order to utilize this connection for our quest…
I present a new class of topological string theories, and discuss them in two dimensions as candidates for the string description of large-$N$ QCD. The starting point is a new class of topological sigma models, whose path integral is…
Closed string tachyons have long been somewhat mysterious. We note that there is often a regime in the classical moduli space in which one can systematically compute the effective action for such fields. In this regime, the tachyon is…
The classical black hole background of two-dimensional string theory is examined after including the effect of the tachyon field. Keeping all terms upto $O(T^2)$, and making no other approximations, the only consistent classical solution to…
We study some properties of the tachyonic lumps in the level truncation scheme of bosonic cubic string field theory. We find that several gauges work well and that the size of the lump as well as its tension is approximately independent of…
The one-plaquette Hamiltonian of large N lattice gauge theory offers a constructive model of a $1+1$-dimensional string theory with a stable ground state. The free energy is found to be equivalent to the partition function of a string where…
In four decades of string theory research, only a handful of non-supersymmetric tachyon-free strings with only one neutral scalar at tree level were found. We construct new such non-supersymmetric tachyon-free string theories using…
In this talk we discuss the cosmic singularity. We motivate the need to correct general relativity in the study of singularities, and mention the kind of corrections provided by string theory. We review how string theory resolves time-like…
A class of non-supersymmetric string backgrounds can be constructed using twists that involve space-time fermion parity. We propose a non-perturbative definition of string theory in these backgrounds via gauge theories with supersymmetry…
String theory suggests modifications of our spacetime such as extra dimensions and the existence of a mininal length scale. In models with addidional dimensions, the Planck scale can be lowered to values accessible by future colliders.…