Related papers: Phase transition at high supersymmetry breaking sc…
We study the cosmology of perturbative heterotic superstring theory during the radiation-like era for semi-realistic backgrounds with initial $\N=1$ supersymmetry. This analysis is valid for times after the Hagedorn era (or alternatively…
We argue that closed string tachyons drive two spacetime topology changing transitions -- loss of genus in a Riemann surface and separation of a Riemann surface into two components. The tachyons of interest are localized versions of…
We recently proposed a class of type IIB vacua that yield, at low energies, four--dimensional Minkowski spaces with broken supersymmetry and a constant string coupling. They are compactifications with an internal five-torus bearing a…
We develop methods to probe the excitation spectrum of topological phases of matter in two spatial dimensions. Applying these to the Fibonacci string nets perturbed away from exact solvability, we analyze a topological phase transition…
We consider an open-string realisation of $\mathcal{N}=2\to \mathcal{N}=0$ spontaneous breaking of supersymmetry in four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime. It is based on type IIB orientifold theory compactified on $T^2\times…
The moduli space of the maximally supersymmetric heterotic string in d-dimensional Minkowski space contains various components characterized by the rank of the gauge symmetries of the vacua they parametrize. We develop an approach for…
In this thesis we investigate some aspects of the dramatic consequences of supersymmetry breaking on string vacua. In particular, we focus on the issue of vacuum stability in ten-dimensional string models with broken, or without,…
We study string theory on orbifolds in the presence of an antisymmetric constant background field in detail and discuss some of new aspects of the theory. It is pointed out that the term with the antisymmetric background field can be…
In addition to the familiar string theories with spacetime supersymmetry, there exist a number of non-supersymmetric ten-dimensional superstrings. Nearly all of these theories have closed string tachyons, indicating a misidentification of…
Type II string theory and M-theory admit flux configurations that break supersymmetry below the Kaluza-Klein scale. These backgrounds play a central role in most models of the string landscape. I argue that the behavior of such backgrounds…
Supersymmetry breaking in string perturbation theory predicts the existence of a new dimension at the TeV scale. The simplest realization of the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model in the context of this mechanism has two important…
Perturbative heterotic string theory develops a single complex tachyonic mode beyond the Hagedorn temperature. We calculate the quartic effective potential for this tachyonic mode at the critical temperature. Equivalently, we determine the…
This article is devoted to an overview of superstring perturbation theory from the point of view of super Riemann surfaces. We aim to elucidate some of the subtleties of superstring perturbation that caused difficulty in the early…
We discuss one of the generic spacetime consequences of having (1,0) worldsheet supersymmetry in tachyon-free string theory, namely the appearance of a ``misaligned supersymmetry'' in the corresponding spacetime spectrum. Misaligned…
We argue that the study of the statistics of the landscape of string vacua provides the first potentially predictive -- and also falsifiable -- framework for string theory. The question of whether the theory does or does not predict low…
We propose a novel string theory propagating in a non-commutative deformation of the four dimensional space T* T^2 whose scattering states correspond to superconformal theories in 5 dimensions and the scattering amplitudes compute…
We examine the problem of supersymmetry breaking in realistic superstring standard--like models which are constructed in the free fermionic formulation. We impose a supersymmetric vacuum at the Planck scale by requiring vanishing F and D…
We analyze the stability properties of a family of anti-de Sitter flux compactifications of the tachyon-free non-supersymmetric heterotic string in ten dimensions. In contrast with simpler such solutions, the solutions include two…
If a global continuous symmetry of a supersymmetric field theory is spontaneously broken while preserving the supersymmetry, the resulting theory has a massless superfield. One of its two bosonic degrees of freedom is the familiar phase…
In four decades of string theory research, only a handful of non-supersymmetric tachyon-free strings with only one neutral scalar at tree level were found. We construct new such non-supersymmetric tachyon-free string theories using…