Related papers: D-instantons in Real Time Dynamics
Instanton theory relates the rate constant for tunneling through a barrier to the periodic classical trajectory on the upturned potential energy surface whose period is $\tau=\hbar/(k_{\rm B}T)$. Unfortunately, the standard theory is only…
We analyze M5-instantons in F-theory, or equivalently D3-instantons with varying axio-dilaton, in the presence of 7-brane gauge groups. The chiral two-form on the M5-brane plays an important role, because it couples the M5-brane to vector…
We consider the de Sitter cosmology deformed by the presence of a thermal bath of radiation and/or time-dependent moduli fields. Depending on the parameters, either a first or second order phase transition can occur. In the first case, an…
Instantons, localised saddle points of the action, play an important role in describing non-perturbative aspects of quantum field theories, for example vacuum decay or violation of conservation laws associated with anomalous symmetries.…
We study the tunneling of virtual matter-antimatter pairs from the quantum vacuum in the presence of a spatially uniform, time-dependent electric background composed of a strong, slow field superimposed with a weak, rapid field. After…
In five spacetime dimensions, instantons are finite energy, solitonic particles. We describe the dynamics of these objects in the presence of a Chern-Simons interaction. For U(N) instantons, we show that the 5d Chern-Simons term induces a…
N=1^* gauge theories are believed to have fractional instanton contributions in the confining vacua. D3 brane probe computations in gravitation dual of large-N N=2^* gauge theories point to the absence of such contributions in the low…
We investigate the cosmological signatures of instantons mediating tunneling between de Sitter minima. For generic potentials the Coleman-de Luccia instanton does not necessarily exist; when it does not, the instanton which contributes to…
The effects of instantons close to the cut-off is studied in four dimensional SU(2) gauge theory with higher order derivative terms in the action. It is found in the framework of the dilute instanton gas approximation that the convergence…
I present an informal overview of several recent results about Euclidean saddle points sourced by axion fields in quantum gravity (AdS/CFT), such as wormholes, their extremal "D-instanton" limits and their under-extremal singular…
D-instanton calculus has proved to be able to probe the AdS near horizon geometry for $N$ D-branes systems which, when decoupled from gravity, yield four dimensional superconformal gauge theories with various matter content. In this work we…
Instanton processes are present in a variety of quantum field theories relevant to high energy as well as condensed matter physics. While they have led to important theoretical insights and physical applications, their underlying features…
Non-perturbative features of the derivative expansion of the effective action of a single D3-brane are obtained by considering scattering amplitudes of open and closed strings. This motivates expressions for the coupling constant dependence…
We show that instanton calculations in QCD become theoretically well defined in the gluon saturation environment which suppresses large size instantons. The effective cutoff scale is determined by the inverse of the saturation scale. We…
D-instanton world-volume theory has open string zero modes describing collective coordinates of the instanton. The usual perturbative amplitudes in the D-instanton background suffer from infra-red divergences due to the presence of these…
Duality arguments are used to determine D-instanton contributions to certain effective interaction terms of type II supergravity theories in various dimensions. This leads to exact expressions for the partition functions of the finite N…
According to the positive energy conjecture of Horowitz and Myers, there is a specific supergravity solution, AdS soliton, which has minimum energy among all asymptotically locally AdS solutions with the same boundary conditions. Related to…
We study the instantons (or bounces) in the Brown-Teitelboim (BT) mechanism of relaxation of cosmological constant which is a cosmological version of the Schwinger mechanism. The BT mechanism is a false vacuum decay of (A)dS$_{d+1}$ (and…
We study the Einstein-Chern-Simons gravity coupled to Yang-Mills-Higgs theory in three dimensional Euclidean space with cosmological constant. The classical equations reduce to Bogomol'nyi type first order equations in curved space. There…
We investigate the role of gauge and gravitational instantons in the context of the Swampland program. Our focus is on the global symmetry breaking they induce, especially in the presence of fermions. We first recall and make more precise…