Related papers: Stability and vacuum energy in open string models …
Recently, Baykara, Tarazi and Vafa discussed the existence of quasicrystalline string vacua that contain a single neutral moduli, the dilaton, and studied compactifications of the non-supersymmetric $SO(16)\times SO(16)$ heterotic-string on…
A convincing, uncontroversial observation of string breaking, when the static potential is extracted from Wilson loops only, is still missing. This failure can be understood if the overlap of the Wilson loop with the broken string is…
In the present thesis I studied the phenomenology arising from a class of string models called sequestered compactifications, which were born with the aim of getting low-energy SUSY from strings. This is not an easy task if combined with…
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…
It appears to be difficult within string theory to obtain genuine scale separation between spacetime and the internal sector. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism for scale-separated vacua which hinges on stringy effects that are…
The static potential in the confinement ``phase'' of the SU(2) Higgs model is studied. In particular, the observation of the screening (called string breaking) of the static quarks by the dynamical light quarks leading to the formation of…
We discuss massless and massive neutrino zero modes in the background of an electroweak string. We argue that the eventual absence of the neutrino zero mode implies the existence of topologically stable strings where the required…
We provide a thorough exposition, including technical and numerical details, of previously published results on the quantum stabilization of cosmic strings. Stabilization occurs through the coupling to a heavy fermion doublet in a reduced…
We investigate the stability of the electroweak Z-string at high temperatures. Our results show that while finite temperature corrections can improve the stability of the Z-string, their effect is not strong enough to stabilize the Z-string…
We study different phenomenological aspects of compact, D=4, N=1 Type IIB orientifolds considered as models for unification of the standard model and gravity. We discuss the structure of the compactification, string and unification scales…
We construct the 4D N=1 supergravity which describes the low-energy limit of 6D supergravity compactified on a sphere with a monopole background a la Salam and Sezgin. This provides a simple setting sharing the main properties of realistic…
We show how to extend the usual black string instability of vacuum or charged black p-branes to the anti-de Sitter background. The string fragments in an analogous fashion to the $\Lambda=0$ case, the main difference being that instead of a…
We study aspects of obtaining field theories with noncommuting time-space coordinates as limits of open-string theories in constant electric-field backgrounds. We find that, within the standard closed-string backgrounds, there is an…
Moduli stabilisation in superstring compactifications on Calabi-Yau orientifolds remains a key challenge in the search for realistic string vacua. In particular, odd moduli arising from the reduction of 2-forms $(B_2,C_2)$ in type IIB are…
We find that tachyonic orbifold examples of AdS/CFT have corresponding instabilities at small radius, and can decay to more generic gauge theories. We do this by computing a destabilizing Coleman-Weinberg effective potential for twisted…
In this Thesis we investigate properties of stability, rigidity and unitarity of the string landscape in ten and lower dimensions. The dissertation explores these aspects by intertwining a detailed analysis of string vacua, with and without…
In this review we describe our current understanding of the properties of open string tachyons on an unstable D-brane or brane-antibrane system in string theory. The various string theoretic methods used for this study include techniques of…
We consider Penrose limits of the Klebanov-Strassler and Maldacena-Nunez holographic duals to N =1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills. By focusing in on the IR region we obtain exactly solvable string theory models. These represent the…
Sequestering is a promising mechanism in 4D string models to reconcile high-scale inflation with low-energy supersymmetry. In this scenario the MSSM lives on branes at singularities and it is sequestered from the sources of supersymmetry…
We propose a simple, well-motivated and robust alternative to a metastable de Sitter vacuum in string theory, consistent with current observations of dark energy and naturally satisfying conjectured swampland constraints. Inflation ends in…