Related papers: A Solution to the Decompactification Problem in Ch…
This thesis reviews minimal N=2 chiral supergravities coupled to matter in six dimensions with emphasis on anomaly cancellation. In general, six-dimensional chiral supergravities suffer from gravitational, gauge and mixed anomalies which…
We present an additional test of the recent proposal for describing supersymmetry breaking due to gaugino condensation in the strong coupling regime, by a Scherk-Schwarz mechanism on the eleventh dimension of M-theory. An analysis of…
Natural supersymmetric theories of the weak scale are under growing pressure given present LHC constraints, raising the question of whether untuned supersymmetric (SUSY) solutions to the hierarchy problem are possible. In this paper, we…
We construct gauge theories in two extra dimensions compactified on the chiral square, which is a simple compactification that leads to chiral fermions in four dimensions. Stationarity of the action on the boundary specifies the boundary…
The Higgs quartic coupling has now been indirectly measured at the electroweak scale. Assuming no new low-scale physics, its running is known and, together with gauge and Yukawa couplings, it is a crucial new piece of information…
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…
The subject of this thesis are various ways to construct four-dimensional quantum field theories from string theory. In a first part we study the generation of a supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, coupled to an adjoint chiral superfield,…
Free massless scalars have a shift symmetry. This is usually broken by gauge and Yukawa interactions, such that quantum corrections induce a quadratically divergent mass term. In the Standard Model this leads to the hierarchy problem of the…
Global consistency of string compactifications places constraints on the chiral matter spectrum of a gauge theory which include those necessary for the absence of cubic nonabelian anomalies, but also contain some additional conditions. In…
The problem of the gauge hierarchy is brought up in a hypercomplex scheme for a U(1) field theory; in such a scheme a compact gauge group is deformed through a \gamma-parameter that varies along a non-compact internal direction, transverse…
We show that large string threshold corrections can reconcile the string and MSSM unification scales in fermionic strings. This requires at least three moduli with large VEVs which are different from each other and MSSM states arising in an…
We present evidence for a new deconstruction of Little String Theory (LST). The starting point is a four-dimensional conformal field theory on its Higgs branch which provides a lattice regularization of six-dimensional gauge theory. We…
Motivated by the electroweak hierarchy problem, we consider theories with two extra dimensions in which the four-dimensional scalar fields are components of gauge boson in full space. We explore the Nielsen-Olesen instability for SU(N) on a…
Warped compactifications with significant warping provide one of the few known mechanisms for naturally generating large hierarchies of physical scales. We demonstrate that this mechanism is realizable in string theory, and give examples…
In the superstring models we have not only the complete {\bf 27} multiplets of $E_6$ but also extra incomplete $({\bf 27}+{\overline {\bf 27}})$ chiral supermultiplets being alive at low energies. Associated with these additional…
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…
We derive the moduli dependent threshold corrections to gauge couplings in toroidal orbifold compactifications. The underlying six dimensional torus lattice of the heterotic string theory is not assumed ---as in previous calculations--- to…
It is demonstrated how the hierarchy between the gauge coupling unification scale of minimal supersymmetry and the Planck (or string) scale, which resembles in order of magnitude a loop factor, can actually be explained as such in…
We consider supersymmetry breaking due to a Scherk-Schwarz twist or localized mass terms in 6d ${\cal N}=1$ supersymmetric gauge theory compactified on the orbifold $T^2/Z_2$. We show that the Scherk-Schwarz breaking in 6d is equivalent to…
We consider the reduction of the duality invariant approach to M-theory by a U-duality group valued Scherk-Schwarz twist. The result is to produce potentials for gauged supergravities that are normally associated with non-geometric…