Related papers: Demystifying the Holographic Mystique
This article briefly summarizes the motivations for -- and recent progress in -- searching for cosmological configurations within string theory, with a focus on how much we might reasonably hope to learn about fundamental physics from…
There have been many remarkable developments in our understanding of superstring theory in the past few years, a period that has been described as ``the second superstring revolution.'' Several of them are discussed here. The presentation…
The mystery of the cosmological constant is probably the most pressing obstacle to significantly improving the models of elementary particle physics derived from string theory. The problem arises because in the standard framework of low…
Recent astrophysical observations, pertaining to either high-redshift supernovae or cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuations, as those measured recently by the WMAP satellite, provide us with data of unprecedented accuracy,…
The lens candidate CSL-1 has been interpreted as evidence for a cosmic string. Here we test the hypothesis that the lensing comes from a tidally disrupted dark matter halo. We calculate the mass-density relationship that one would expect…
Cosmic strings are predicted in many models beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. In models which admit strings, a network of strings will inevitably be formed in a phase transition in the early universe and will persist to the…
It has been suggested that cosmological dark matter may include a population of vortons (meaning small centrifugally stabilised cosmic string loops) as an outcome of (non-standard) electroweak symmetry breaking. The implications for this…
The topic of cosmic strings provides a bridge between the physics of the very small and the very large. They are predicted by some unified theories of particle interactions. If they exist, they may help to explain some of the largest-scale…
We begin the study of a class of string-motivated effective supergravity theories in light of current data from the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The case of heterotic string theory, in which the dilaton is stabilized via…
The recent progress in string theory strongly suggests that formation and evaporation of black holes is a unitary process. This fact makes it imperative that we find a flaw in the semiclassical reasoning that implies a loss of information.…
One of the main goals of modern cosmology remains to summon up a self consistent policy, able to explain, in the framework of the Einstein's theory, the cosmic speed up and the presence of Dark Matter in the Universe. Accordingly to the…
In this note further evidence is collected in support of the claim that the space-time uncertainty principle implies holography, both within the context of Matrix Theory and the framework of the proposed duality between certain conformal…
The evidence for the dark matter of the hot big bang cosmology is about as good as it gets in natural science. The exploration of its nature is now led by direct and indirect detection experiments, to be complemented by advances in the full…
String theory has been the dominating research field in theoretical physics during the last decades. Despite the considerable time elapse, no new testable predictions have been derived by string theorists and it is understandable that…
In hep-th/0310120, Goheer, Kleban and Susskind argued that the holographic principle is inconsistent with the existence of stable, Lorentz invariant, 1+1 dimensional compactifications. We note some difficulties with their analysis and…
Previous studies have examined the holographic principle as a means of producing dark energy. Here we propose instead the possibility of holographic dark matter. In this case, dark matter does not arise in the framework of particle physics…
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…
Inspired by the cuprate stripes, the problem of a one dimensional metal living on a delocalized trajectory in two dimensional space is considered. Under the assumption that a localized and charge incompressible reference string state…
There are two main reasons for the recent renewal of interest in cosmic strings: Fundamental string-theory models suggest their existence; and there are at least two tentative observations of their possible effects. In this talk, I review…
Recent astrophysical observations have motivated novel theoretical models of the dark matter sector. A class of such models predicts the existence of GeV scale cosmic strings that communicate with the standard model sector by Aharonov-Bohm…