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We explore bosonic strings and Type II superstrings in the simplest time dependent backgrounds, namely orbifolds of Minkowski space by time reversal and some spatial reflections. We show that there are no negative norm physical excitations.…
The cosmological constant is an unexplained until now phenomena of nature that requires an explanation through string effects. The apparent discrepancy between theory and experiment is enourmous and has already been explained several times…
The cosmological constant problem is turned around to argue for a new foundational physics postulate underlying a consistent quantum theory of gravity and matter, such as string theory. This postulate is a quantum equivalence principle…
In this paper we study a new symmetry argument that results in a vacuum state with strictly vanishing vacuum energy. This argument exploits the well-known feature that de Sitter and Anti- de Sitter space are related by analytic…
Higher dimensional, static, cylindrically symmetric vacuum solutions with and without a cosmological constant in the Brans-Dicke theory are presented. We show that, for a negative cosmological constant and for specific values of the…
We show that a theory with conformal invariance, which is explicitly broken by small terms, provides a solution to the fine tuning problem of the cosmological constant. In the absence of the symmetry breaking terms, the cosmological…
We study the possibility of canceling the cosmological constant in supergravity string models. We show that with a suitable choice of superpotential the vacuum energy may vanish with the dilaton field at its minimum and supersymmetry broken…
We show that a positive cosmological constant is incompatible with the quantum-corpuscular resolution of de Sitter metric in form of a coherent state. The reason is very general and is due to the quantum self-destruction of the coherent…
I describe an approach which connects classical gravity with the quantum microstructure of spacetime. The field equations arise from maximizing the density of states of matter plus geometry. The former is identified using the thermodynamics…
The phenomenology of the FLRW models with non-vanishing cosmological constant (CC) is briefly surveyed in the light of the recent astrophysical and cosmological observations. A subset of these models, which probably includes the world where…
The Planck scale is usually believed to be an unpassable wall. Putting a cutoff there and thinking of it as a quantized spacetime entity shows that. However, this is exactly the cause of many problems in quantum gravity. The cosmological…
We show that the cosmological constant may be reduced by thermal production of membranes by the cosmological horizon, analogous to a particle ``going over the top of the potential barrier", rather than tunneling through it. The membranes…
The energy density of the universe today may be dominated by the vacuum energy of a slowly rolling scalar field. Making a quantum expansion around such a time dependent solution is found to break fundamental symmetries of quantum field…
False vacuum decay typically proceeds via the nucleation of spherical bubbles of true vacuum, described by $O(4)$ symmetric field configurations in Euclidean time. In this work, we investigate how the presence of cosmic strings can catalyze…
This is the written version of a talk given at the Santa Barbara Workshop on Supersymmetry in December of 1995. It summarizes a collection of results on superstring cosmology obtained by the author and various collaborators, and contains…
A new way is proposed to cancel the cosmological constant. The proposal involves the metric determinant acting as a type of self-adjusting $q$-field without need of a fine-tuned chemical potential. Since the determinant of the metric now…
A central aspect of the cosmological constant problem is to understand why vacuum energy does not gravitate. In order to account for this observation, while allowing for nontrivial dynamics of the quantum vacuum, we motivate a novel…
The idea of the quantum state of the Universe described by some density matrix, i.e mixture of at least two vacua, the trivial symmetric and the nontrivial one with spontaneously broken symmetry is discussed. Nonzero cosmological constant…
We explore a toy model mechanism of geometric cancellation, alleviating the (classical) cosmological constant problem. To do so, we assume at primordial times that vacuum energy fuels an inflationary quadratic hilltop potential nonminimally…
A large value of the cosmological constant (CC) is induced in the Standard Model (SM) of Elementary Particle Physics because of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking. To provide a small value of the observable CC one has to introduce the vacuum…