Related papers: A Chern-Simons Pandemic
The interpretation of the apparent unification of gauge couplings within supersymmetric theories depends on uncertainties induced through heavy particle thresholds. While in standard grand unified theories these effects can be estimated…
String theory avoids the ultraviolet infinities that arise in trying to quantize gravity. It is also more predictive than conventional quantum field theory, one aspect of this being the way that it contributed to the emergence of the…
By coupling {\cal N}=8 superconformal matter to {\cal N}=8 superconformal Chern-Simons gravity in three dimensions we obtain theories with novel terms in the scalar potential leading to AdS_3 solutions and superconformal symmetry breaking.…
Higher-order theories of gravity have received much attention from several areas including quantum gravity, string theory and cosmology. This paper proposes a higher-order gravity whose action includes all curvature scalar terms up to the…
We show that matching anomalies under large gauge transformations and large diffeomorphisms can explain the appearance and non-renormalization of couplings in effective field theory. We focus on thermal effective field theory where we argue…
In the present article, Chern-Simons gauge theory and its relationship with gravity are revisited from a geometrical viewpoint. In this setting, our goals are twofold: In one hand, to show how to represent the family of variational problems…
In recent years it has been realized that in string/$M$ theories compactified to four dimensions which satisfy cosmological constraints, it is possible to make some generic predictions for particle physics and dark matter: a non-thermal…
We study the three-dimensional theory of two Chern-Simons gauge fields coupled to a scalar field in the bifundamental representation of the $SU(N)_k \times SU(M)_{-k}$ gauge group. At small but fixed $M \ll N$, this system approaches the…
Effective gravitational field theories with background fields break local Lorentz symmetry and diffeomorphism invariance. Examples include Chern-Simons gravity, massive gravity, and the Standard-Model Extension (SME). The physical…
I review the relations between mass scales in various string theories and in M-theory. I discuss physical motivations and possible consistent realizations of large volume compactifications and low string scale. Large longitudinal…
The absence of global symmetries in a quantum gravity theory often requires the introduction of (new) symmetry-breaking defects, which appear as singular objects in the low-energy description. This has been formalized in the Cobordism…
Recently, a new framework for solving the hierarchy problem has been proposed which does not rely on low energy supersymmetry or technicolor. The gravitational and gauge interactions unite at the electroweak scale, and the observed weakness…
We employ the recent results on the generalization of the $c$-theorem to 2+1-d to derive non-perturbative results for strongly interacting quantum field theories, including QED-3 and the critical theory corresponding to certain quantum…
In this paper we study supersymmetric Chern-Simons-matter (CSM) theories with several Higgs branches. Two such theories at small Chern-Simons level are conjectured to describe the superconformal field theory at the infrared fixed point of N…
Non-invertible one-form symmetries are naturally realized in (2+1)d topological quantum field theories. In this work, we consider the potential realization of such symmetries in (2+1)d conformal field theories, investigating whether gapless…
String theory and supersymmetry are theoretical ideas that go beyond the standard model of particle physics and show promise for unifying all forces. After a brief introduction to supersymmetry, we discuss the prospects for its experimental…
This is a broad-brush review of how string theory addresses several important questions of gravitational physics. The problem of non-renormalizability is first reviewed, followed by introduction of string theory as an ultraviolet-finite…
We propose a gravitation theory in 4 dimensional space-time obtained by compacting to 4 dimensions the five dimensional topological Chern-Simons theory with the gauge group SO(1,5) or SO(2,4) -- the de Sitter or anti-de Sitter group of…
Symmetry Theories (SymThs) provide a flexible framework for analyzing the global categorical symmetries of a $D$-dimensional QFT$_{D}$ in terms of a $(D+1)$-dimensional bulk system SymTh$_{D+1}$. In QFTs realized via local string…
A simple cubic matrix model is presented, which has truncations that, it is argued, lead at the classical level to a variety of theories of gauge fields and gravity. These include Chern-Simons theory in d=3, and BF theory and general…