Related papers: Compact objects and the swampland
We consider the cosmological dynamics associated with volume weighted measures of eternal inflation, in the Bousso-Polchinski model of the string theory landscape. We find that this measure predicts that observers are most likely to find…
Bosonic stars represent a hypothetical exotic type of compact stellar objects that could be observed from the gravitational signal of coalescing binaries in current and future gravitational wave detectors. There are two main families of…
We investigate static, spherically symmetric solutions in Einstein-scalar-Gauss-Bonnet gravity non-minimally coupled to a massless real scalar field, both in vacuum and in the presence of fermionic matter. Focusing on a specific quadratic…
Recently, various swampland conjectures have been proposed that every UV complete effective field theory should satisfy. In particular, these deal with the properties of AdS and dS solutions arising in theories of quantum gravity. Mainly…
Assuming that inflation happened through a series of tunneling in the string theory landscape, it is argued that one can determine the structure of vacua using precise measurements of the scalar spectral index and tensor perturbations at…
We derive formulas for counting certain classes of vacua in the string/M theory landscape. We do so in the context of the moduli space of M-theory compactifications on singular manifolds with G_2 holonomy. Particularly, we count the numbers…
One class of single-field inflationary models compatible with the recently-conjectured Swampland criteria would be those in which a Hubble slow-roll parameter $\epsilon_\text{H}$ is not the same as $\epsilon_\text{V} \sim (V'/V)^2$.…
We prove the following theorem: axisymmetric, stationary solutions of the Einstein field equations formed from classical gravitational collapse of matter obeying the null energy condition, that are everywhere smooth and ultracompact (i.e.,…
Negative mass brane-like objects known as orientifolds are crucial in the construction of all presently understood realistic string compactifications and I review in general the link between negative energy objects and the existence of a…
For bouncing cosmologies such as the ekpyrotic/cyclic scenarios we show that it is possible to make predictions for density perturbations which are independent of the details of the bouncing phase. This can be achieved, as in inflationary…
We argue that topological compactons (solitons with compact support) may be quite common objects if $k$-fields, i.e., fields with nonstandard kinetic term, are considered, by showing that even for models with well-behaved potentials the…
We present a compact theorem which reveals the fact that static spatially regular massive scalar fields with nonminimal coupling to gravity cannot form spherically symmetric asymptotically flat horizonless matter configurations. In…
The Ooguri-Vafa Swampland Conjectures claim that in any consistent theory of quantum gravity, when venturing to large distances in scalar field space, a tower of particles will become light at a rate that is exponential in the field space…
We study the computational complexity of the physical problem of finding vacua of string theory which agree with data, such as the cosmological constant, and show that such problems are typically NP hard. In particular, we prove that in the…
We present a minimal cosmological solution to the hierarchy problem. Our model consists of a light pseudoscalar and an extra Higgs doublet in addition to the field content of the Standard Model. We consider a landscape of vacua with varying…
The plethora of scalar fields participating in the formulation of a softly broken supersymmetric theory can threat the stability of the standard vacuum. The generic situation is twofold. Directions in scalar field space may exist along…
We consider the question of asymptotic observables in cosmology. We assume that string theory contains a landscape of vacua, and that metastable de Sitter regions can decay to zero cosmological constant by bubble nucleation. The asymptotic…
I argue that isolated vacua of M-theory, cannot in any conventional way be said to live in the same theory as other disconnected parts of the moduli space. The usual field theoretic mechanisms, which allow an observer in one disconnected…
The quantum gravity conjectures that aim to separate the landscape from the swampland among the low energy theories were originally formulated in the context of scalar field spaces spanned by moduli. Because these conjectures have…
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,…