Related papers: What if string theory has no de Sitter vacua?
These lectures give a detailed introduction to constructing and analyzing string vacua suitable for phenomenological model building, with particular emphasis on F-theory flux vacua. Topics include (1) general challenges and overview of some…
This is an invited contribution to the Special Issue of "Foundations of Physics" titled "Forty Years Of String Theory: Reflecting On the Foundations". I have been asked to assess string theory as an outsider, and to compare it with the…
String theory on curved backgrounds has received much attention on account of both its own interest, and of its relation with gauge theories. Despite the progress made in various directions, several quite elementary questions remain…
We present a new way to construct de Sitter vacua in type IIB flux compactifications, in which the interplay of the leading perturbative and non-perturbative effects stabilize all moduli in dS vacua at parametrically large volume. Here, the…
At the present time, string theory (and its generalizations) remain relatively abstruse subjects to the particle phenomenologist and experimentalist. Yet, striking developments of the last two years offer hope that a fundamental…
We extend a recent scenario of Kachru, Kallosh, Linde and Trivedi to fix the string moduli fields by using a combination of fluxes and non-perturbative superpotentials, leading to de Sitter vacua. In our scenario the non-perturbative…
We review the prospect of obtaining tree-level de Sitter (dS) vacua and slow-roll inflation models in string compactifications. Restricting ourselves to the closed string sector and assuming the absence of NSNS-sources, we classify the…
String field theory is supposed to stand to perturbative string theory as quantum field theory stands to single-particle quantum theory; as such, it purports to offer a substantially more general and powerful perspective on string theory…
Free scalar field theory in the sector with a large number of particles can be interpreted as bosonic string theory on anti-de Sitter space of vanishing radius. Different ways of writing the field theory Hamiltonian translate to different…
We present a concrete string-theoretic mechanism that generates four-dimensional de Sitter vacua from non-geometric R-flux compactifications of heterotic string theory. The construction rests on three pillars: the Malcev algebra generated…
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,…
The purpose of this short review is to present progresses in string theory in the recent past. There have been very important developments in our understanding of string dynamics, especially in the nonperturbative aspects. In this context,…
This is a talk given at YKIS '95, primarily to non-string theorists. I review the evidence for string duality, the principle that any string theory at strong coupling looks like another string theory at weak coupling. A postscript…
We argue that if de Sitter space is indeed represented by a finite dimensional quantum system, then semi-classical considerations, combined with the fundamental principles of quantum measurement theory, imply that any theoretical model of…
In this paper, we will analyze a quantum deformation of cubic string field theory. This will be done by first constructing a quantum deformation of string theory, in a covariant gauge, and then using the quantum deformed stringy theory to…
It seems likely that string theory has a landscape of vacua that includes very many metastable de Sitter spaces. However, as emphasized by Banks, Dine and Gorbatov, no current framework exists for examining these metastable vacua in string…
This paper explores infrared quantum effects in the de Sitter space. The notion of "eternal manifolds" is introduced and it is shown that in most cases the de Sitter space doesn't belong to this class. It is unstable under small…
One of the central problems of string-phenomenology is to find stable vacua in the four dimensional effective theories which result from compactification. We present an algorithmic method to find all of the vacua of any given…
Identifying string theory vacua with desired physical properties at low energies requires searching through high-dimensional solution spaces - collectively referred to as the string landscape. We highlight that this search problem is…
We construct a new class of metastable de Sitter vacua of flux compactifications of type IIB string theory. These solutions provide a natural extension of the `Large Volume Scenario' anti-de Sitter vacua, and can analogously be realised at…