Related papers: On String Vacua without Supersymmetry: brane dynam…
Recently it was proposed that ten-dimensional tachyonic string vacua may serve as starting points for the construction of viable four dimensional phenomenological string models which are tachyon free. This is achieved by projecting out the…
These lectures aim to provide a global picture of the spaces of consistent quantum supergravity theories and string vacua in higher dimensions. The lectures focus on theories in the even dimensions 10, 8, and 6. Supersymmetry, along with…
We present four-dimensional M-theory vacua with N>0 supersymmetry which, from the perspective of perturbative Type IIA string theory, have N=0. Such vacua can appear when the compactifying 7-manifold is a U(1) fibration. The missing…
We briefly review studies of off-shell stability of vacuum geometries in semiclassical gravity. We propose a study of off-shell stability of vacua in string theory by a distinct, though somewhat related approach -- by studying their…
The Standard Model is the low-energy limit of a microscopic theory which includes extra dimensions and new symmetries. A part of my thesis consisted in constructing a new class of models with two extra dimensions. We showed that these…
String and membrane dynamics may be unified into a theory of 2+2 dimensional self-dual world-volumes living in a 10+2 dimensional target space. Some of the vacua of this M-theory are described by the N=(2,1) heterotic string, whose target…
We show how to construct chiral tachyon-free perturbative orientifold models, where supersymmetry is broken at the string scale on a collection of branes while, to lowest order, the bulk and the other branes are supersymmetric. In higher…
We investigate the evolution of small perturbations around black strings and branes which are low energy solutions of string theory. For simplicity we focus attention on the zero charge case and show that there are unstable modes for a…
We use string duality to describe instanton induced spontaneous supersymmetry breaking in string compactifications with additional background fields. Dynamical supersymmetry breaking by space-time instantons in the heterotic string theory…
Over the past three decades, considerable effort has been devoted to studying the rich and diverse phenomenologies of heterotic strings exhibiting spacetime supersymmetry. Unfortunately, during this same period, there has been relatively…
We embed the supersymmetry breaking mechanism in N=1 SQCD of hep-th/0602239 in a smooth superstring theory using D-branes in the background R^4 \times SL(2)_{k=1}/U(1) which smoothly captures the throat region of an intersecting NS5-brane…
We study systems of $D6$ and $\bar D 6$ branes with non zero world-volume magnetic fields in the weak coupling limit. We find two configurations for which the conditions for absence of tachyons in the spectra coincide exactly with those…
This paper explores the process of vacuum decay in supersymmetric models related to flux compactifications. In particular, we describe these instabilities within supersymmetric Lagrangians for a single three-form multiplet. This multiplet…
It is becoming increasingly clear that metastable vacua may play a prominent role in supersymmetry-breaking. To date, however, this idea has been realized only in models where non-perturbative dynamics complicates the analysis of…
After recasting the standard charged and uncharged brane profiles in the harmonic gauge, we explore solutions with the same isometries where the potentials $V = T \,e^{\gamma\,\phi}$ of ten-dimensional non-supersymmetric strings are taken…
String theory has few or no stable nonsupersymmetric or de Sitter vacua, only metastable ones. Antibranes are a simple source of supersymmetry breaking, as in the KKLT model, but various arguments have been given that these fail to produce…
All the models of elementary particles and their interactions derived from String Theory involve a compact six-dimensional internal space. Its volume and shape should be fixed or stabilized, since otherwise massless scalar fields (moduli)…
We consider the low energy description of five dimensional models of supergravity with boundaries comprising a vector multiplet and the universal hypermultiplet in the bulk. We analyse the spontaneous breaking of supersymmetry induced by…
We consider configurations of six-branes, five-branes and eight-branes in various superstring backgrounds. These configurations give rise to $(0,1)$ supersymmetric theories in six dimensions. The condition for RR charge conservation of a…
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…