Related papers: Coupling a Cosmic String to a TQFT
Monopole-antimonopole pairs connected by strings can be formed as topological defects in a sequence of cosmological phase transitions. Such hybrid defects typically decay early in the history of the universe but can still generate an…
Topological quantum field theories (TQFT) encode properties of quantum states in the topological features of abstract manifolds. One can use the topological avatars of quantum states to develop intuition about different concepts and…
Embedding hidden sector supergravity models in the framework of string theory leads to the appearance of axion-like degrees of freedom. Among them is the model independent axion of heterotic string theory. It has a decay constant of order…
Four-dimensional compactifications of string theory provide a controlled set of possible gauge representations accounting for BSM particles and dark sector components. In this review, constraints from perturbative Type II string…
Short-range entangled topological phases of matter are closely connected to Topological Quantum Field Theory. We use this connection to classify bosonic Symmetry Protected Topological Phases in low dimensions, including the case when the…
Chameleon fields are quantum fields with an increasing mass as a function of the matter density of the environment. Recently chameleon fields have been exploited to solve the cosmological constant problem in the Modified Fujii's Model - MFM…
We construct a family of exactly solvable spin models that illustrate a novel mechanism for fractionalization in topologically ordered phases, dubbed the string flux mechanism. The essential idea is that an anyon of a topological phase can…
We study the cohomology of $G$-representation varieties and $G$-character stacks by means of a topological quantum field theory (TQFT). This TQFT is constructed as the composite of a so-called field theory and the 6-functor formalism of…
We study a simple axionlike model with a charged scalar $\phi$ and a double-charged scalar $\zeta$ of global $U(1)$ symmetry. A particular feature of our model is that a vacuum manifold is a torus knot. We consider a hierarchical…
These lectures present some topics of string phenomenology and contain two parts. In the first part, I review the possibility of lowering the string scale in the TeV region, that provides a theoretical framework for solving the mass…
Global topological defects produce nonzero stress-energy throughout spacetime, and as a result can have observable gravitational influence on surrounding matter. Gravitational effects of global strings are used to place bounds on their…
String theory compactifications come with numerous $U(1)$ factors, implying the presence of many hidden photons in the low-energy EFT. One may call this the ``string photoverse''. We argue that, generically, these hidden photons are…
In this paper we investigate the tachyon instability of open bosonic string theory applying methods of boundary conformal field theory. We consider compactifications on maximal tori of various simple Lie algebras with a specific background…
We show how conformal field theory topological defects can relate solutions of open string field theory for different boundary conditions. To this end we generalize the results of Graham and Watts to include the action of defects on…
We analyze how non-relativistic effective models for the magnetic coupling of a spin to the electromagnetic field (proportional to $\hat{\boldsymbol{\sigma}}\cdot \boldsymbol{B}$) emerge from a full quantum field theoretical description of…
We study the interaction between two parallel cosmic strings induced by gauge fields and by scalar fields with non-minimal couplings to curvature. For small deficit angles the gauge field behaves like a collection of non-minimal scalars…
Generalized global symmetries, in particular non-invertible and categorical symmetries, have become a focal point in the recent study of quantum field theory (QFT). In this paper, we investigate aspects of symmetry topological field…
We argue that the light particles in string theory obey an effective quantum mechanics modified by the inclusion of a quantum-gravitational friction term, induced by unavoidable couplings to unobserved massive string states in the…
We study cosmological perturbations in models with a single non-local scalar field originating from the string field theory description of the rolling tachyon dynamics. We construct the equation for the energy density perturbations of the…
The decomposition of an arbitrary axiomatic topological quantum field theory or TQFT into indecomposable theories is given. In particular, unitary TQFT's in arbitrary dimensions are shown to decompose into a sum of theories in which the…