Related papers: The String Landscape, the Swampland, and the Missi…
The holographic solution is a new exact solution to the Einstein field equations. It describes a compact self-gravitating object with properties similar to a black hole. Its entropy and temperature at infinity are proportional to the…
Perturbative string amplitudes are correctly derived from the string geometry theory, which is one of the candidates of a non-perturbative formulation of string theory. In order to derive non-perturbative effects rather easily, we formulate…
Two quantum theories which look different but are secretly describing the same low-energy physics are said to be dual to each other. When realized in the Topological Holography formalism, duality corresponds to changing the gapped boundary…
By combining swampland conjectures with observational data, it was recently suggested that the cosmological hierarchy problem (i.e. the smallness of the dark energy in Planck units) could be understood as an asymptotic limit in field space,…
This is a review. Comments are welcome. The observation that the structure of string theory is rich enough to include the standard model in rough outline is an old one, starting with the early constructions of free field constructions,…
A double scaling limit can be defined in string theory on a Calabi-Yau (CY) manifold by approaching a point in moduli space where the CY space develops an isolated singularity and at the same time taking the string coupling to zero, while…
In this article we provide a more detailed account of the geometry and topology of the composite bundle formalism introduced by Tresguerres in Phys. Rev. D 66 (2002) 064025 [1] to accommodate gravitation as a gauge theory. In the first half…
Theories of the cosmological constant fall into two classes, those in which the vacuum energy is fixed by the fundamental theory and those in which it is adjustable in some way. For each class we discuss key challenges. The string theory…
In string theory, black-hole backgrounds are far from unique and there are large families of completely smooth, horizonless geometries with the same structure as a black hole from infinity down to the neighborhood of the black-hole horizon.…
The holographic principle states that the number of degrees of freedom describing the physics inside a volume (including gravity) is bounded by the area of the boundary (also called the screen) which encloses this volume. A stronger…
We propose an open/closed string duality in general backgrounds extending previous ideas about open string completeness by Ashoke Sen. Our proposal sets up a general version of holography that works in gravity as a tomographic principle. We…
On the basis of a number of Swampland conditions, we argue that the Hilbert space of baby universe states must be one-dimensional in a consistent theory of quantum gravity. This scenario may be interpreted as a type of "Gauss's law for…
Ever since its birth, up until its present development, the major role of string theory involves being the best candidate for the theory of quantum gravity and other species of interactions. In the present work, we would like to accomplish…
We briefly review three aspects of string cosmology: (1) the ``stochastic'' approach to the pre-big bang scenario, (2) the presence of chaos in the generic cosmological solutions of the tree-level low-energy effective actions coming out of…
Inspired by the low wave-length limit of topological M-theory, which re-constructs the theory of $3+1$D gravity in the self-dual variables' formulation, and by the realization that in Loop Quantum Gravity the holonomy of a flat connection…
Gravitational holography is argued to render the cosmological constant stable against divergent quantum corrections. This provides a technically natural solution to the cosmological constant problem. Evidence for quantum stability of the…
We investigate the lifting of half-maximal four-dimensional gauged supergravities to compactifications of string theory. It is shown that a class of such supergravities can arise from compactifications of IIA string theory on manifolds of…
String theory is canonically accompanied with a space-time interpretation which determines S-matrix-like observables, and connects to the standard physics at low energies in the guise of local effective field theory. Recently, we have…
I present a new class of topological string theories, and discuss them in two dimensions as candidates for the string description of large-$N$ QCD. The starting point is a new class of topological sigma models, whose path integral is…
We outline a holographic framework that attempts to unify Landau and beyond-Landau paradigms of quantum phases and phase transitions. Leveraging a modern understanding of symmetries as topological defects/operators, the framework uses a…