Related papers: Quantum stabilization of a hedgehog type of cosmic…
Z-strings in the Weinberg-Salam model including fermions are unstable for all values of the parameters. The cause of this instability is the fermion vacuum energy in the Z-string background. Z-strings with non-zero fermion densities,…
New physics beyond the Standard Model can give rise to stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds, for example through cosmic strings. In this way, gravitational-wave searches with pulsar-timing arrays as well as existing and future laser…
We study the classical dynamics of SU(2)-Higgs field theory using multiple scale perturbation theory. In the spontaneously broken phase, assuming small perturbations of the Higgs field around its vacuum expectation value, we derive a…
We revisit the stability of the Standard Model vacuum, and investigate its quantum effective potential using the highest available orders in perturbation theory and the most accurate determination of input parameters to date. We observe…
Cosmic strings in realistic particle physics models have fermion zero modes in the string core. Such zero modes change the underlying cosmology; for example, the string can carry a current. We consider the stability of fermion zero modes to…
The Cosmological Constant Problem is re-examined from an effective field theory perspective. While the connection between gravity and particle physics has not been experimentally probed in the quantum regime, it is severely constrained by…
Static quark-antiquark states in QCD, at finite quark separation, have a spectrum of metastable states corresponding to string-like excitations of the gauge field. In this article I suggest that there may also exist an excitation spectrum…
We review various aspects of de Sitter spacetime in string theory: its status as an effective field theory spacetime solution, its relation to the vacuum energy problem in string theory, its (global) holographic definition in terms of two…
We consider the 1-loop effective potential in type I string theory compactified on a torus, with supersymmetry broken by the Scherk-Schwarz mechanism. At fixed supersymmetry breaking scale M, and up to exponentially suppressed terms, we…
A mathematical model of the evolution of plane perturbations in the cosmological statistical system of completely degenerate scalar-charged fermions with Higgs scalar interaction for short-wave perturbations is formulated. These disturbance…
We investigate the ground state nature of the transverse field Ising model on the $J_1-J_2$ square lattice at the highly frustrated point $J_2/J_1=0.5$. At zero field, the model has an exponentially large degenerate classical ground state,…
We study the stability properties of the twisted vortex solutions in the semilocal Abelian Higgs model with a global $\mathbf{SU}(2)$ invariance. This model can be viewed as the Weinberg-Salam theory in the limit where the non-Abelian gauge…
We examine the quantum corrections to the static energy for Higgs winding configurations. We evaluate the effective action for such configurations in Weinberg-Salam theory without U(1)-gauge fields or fermions. For a configuration whose…
In string theory the coupling ``constants'' appearing in the low-energy effective Lagrangian are determined by the vacuum expectation values of some (a priori) massless scalar fields (dilaton, moduli). This naturally leads one to expect a…
String dynamics in a curved space-time is studied on the basis of an action functional including a small parameter of rescaled tension $\epsilon=\gamma/\alpha^{\prime}$, where $\gamma$ is a metric parametrizing constant. A rescaled slow…
We show that stable local cosmic strings are a generic prediction of supersymmetric models where supersymmetry is broken at scales within a few orders of magnitude of the weak scale and is fed down to the observable sector by gauge…
We reconsider the idea of identifying the Higgs field as the internal component of a gauge field in the flat space R^4XS^1/Z_2, by relaxing the constraint of having unbroken SO(4,1) Lorentz symmetry in the bulk. In this way, we show that…
Compact lattice Quantum Electrodynamics is a complex quantum field theory with dynamical gauge and matter fields and it has similarities with Quantum Chromodynamics, in particular asymptotic freedom and confinement. We consider a…
We map the parameter space that leads to stable Z-vortices in the electroweak model. For $sin^2 \theta_W = 0.23$, we find that the strings are unstable for a Higgs mass larger than 24 GeV. Given the latest constraints on the Higgs mass from…
Cosmic strings can arise in hidden sector models with a spontaneously broken Abelian symmetry group. We have studied the couplings of the Standard Model fields to these so-called dark strings in the companion paper. Here we survey the…