Related papers: Vacua Morghulis
The quantization of circular strings in an anti-de Sitter background spacetime is performed, obtaining a discrete spectrum for the string mass. A comparison with a four-dimensional homogeneous and isotropic spacetime coupled to a conformal…
We study two-dimensional N=(4,4) supersymmetric gauge theories which do not have classical Higgs branches, but are believed to have isolated quantum Higgs vacua. We provide arguments for the existence of such vacua based on brane dynamics…
We demonstrate that field theories involving explicit breaking of continous symmetries, incorporate two generic classes of topological defects each of which is stable for a particular range of parameters. The first class includes defects of…
We argue that theories with multiple axions generically contain a large number of vacua that can account for the smallness of the cosmological constant. In a theory with N axions, the dominant instantons with charges Q determine the…
We demonstrate a first-principle analysis of the string theory landscapes in the framework of non-critical string/matrix models. In particular, we discuss non-perturbative instability, decay rate and the true vacuum of perturbative string…
We study the scenario that conformal dynamics leads to metastable supersymmetry breaking vacua. At a high energy scale, the superpotential is not R-symmetric, and has a supersymmetric minimum. However, conformal dynamics suppresses several…
We study the scenario that conformal dynamics leads to metastable supersymmetry breaking vacua. At a high energy scale, the superpotential is not R-symmetric, and has a supersymmetric minimum. However, conformal dynamics suppresses several…
No-scale supergravity is the appropriate general framework for low-energy effective field theories derived from string theory. The simplest no-scale K\"ahler potential with a single chiral field corresponds to a compactification to flat…
For landscapes of field theory vacua, we identify an effect that can greatly enhance the decay rates to wildly distant minima--so much so that such transitions may dominate over transitions to near neighbors. We exhibit these 'giant leaps'…
We discuss the stability of vacua in two-dimensional gauge theory for any simple, simply connected gauge group. Making use of the representation of a vacuum in terms of a Wilson line at infinity, we determine which vacua are stable against…
Constructing an explicit compactification yielding a metastable de Sitter (dS) vacuum in a UV consistent string theory is an incredibly difficult open problem. Motivated by this issue, as well as the conjecture that all non-supersymmetric…
We study the classical decay of unstable scalar solitons in noncommutative field theory in 2+1 dimensions. This can, but does not have to, be viewed as a toy model for the decay of D-branes in string theory. In the limit that the…
When supersymmetry is spontaneously broken at tree level, the spectrum of the heterotic string compactified on orbifolds of tori contains an infinite number of potentially tachyonic modes. We show that this implies instabilities of…
We examine implications of the weak gravity conjecture for the mechanisms for discharging cosmological constant via membrane nucleations. Once screening fluxes and membranes which source them enter, and weak gravity bounds are enforced, a…
We present a stringy realization of the ISS metastable SUSY breaking model with moduli stabilization. The mass moduli of the ISS model is stabilized by gauging of a U(1) symmetry and its D-term potential. The SUSY is broken both by F-terms…
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…
In the no-scale supergravity global symmetries protect local supersymmetry and a zero value for the cosmological constant. The breakdown of these symmetries, which ensures the vanishing of the vacuum energy density, results in a set of…
We construct configurations of NS-, D4-, and D6-branes in type IIA string theory, realizing the recently discussed non-supersymmetric meta-stable minimum of 4d N=1 SU(N_c) super-Yang-Mills theories with massive flavors. We discuss their…
We describe two new types of vacua for ten-dimensional string models without supersymmetry, in which dilaton potentials are compensated by constant electric or magnetic fields. These arise from $\alpha '$ corrections to the equations of…
We propose an approach to explaining why naive large quantum fluctuations are not the right estimate for the cosmological constant. We argue that the universe is in a superposition of many vacua, in such a way that the resulting…