Related papers: Fake supersymmetry with tadpole potentials
We address the possibility of false vacuum decay in $N=1$ supergravity theories, including those corresponding to superstring vacua. By establishing a Bogomol'nyi bound for the energy density stored in the domain wall of the $O(4)$…
We consider string theory vacua with tadpoles for dynamical fields and uncover universal features of the resulting spacetime-dependent solutions. We argue that the solutions can extend only a finite distance $\Delta$ away in the spacetime…
We analyze simple models of gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking in the context of supergravity. We distinguish two cases. One is when the messenger of the supersymmetry breaking is a non Abelian gauge force and the other is when the…
Higher curvature Lovelock gravity theories can have a number of maximally symmetric vacua with different values of the curvature. Critical surfaces in the space of Lovelock couplings separate regions with different numbers of such vacua,…
In this paper we investigate the vacuum energies of several models of quantum fields interacting with static external currents (linear couplings) concentrated along parallel branes with an arbitrary number of codimensions. We show that we…
We point out that the swampland conjectures, forbidding the presence of global symmetries and (meta-)stable de Sitter vacua within quantum gravity, pick up a dynamical axion for the electroweak SU(2) gauge theory as a natural candidate for…
We study deconstructed gauge theories in which a warp factor emerges dynamically and naturally. We present nonsupersymmetric models in which the potential for the link fields has translational invariance, broken only by boundary effects…
A strong-weak coupling duality symmetry of the string equations of motion has been suggested in the literature. This symmetry implies that vacua occur in pairs. Since the coupling constant is a dynamical variable in string theory, tunneling…
We propose a deformation principle of gauge theories in three dimensions that can describe topologically stable self-dual gauge fields, i.e., vacua configurations that in spite of their masses do not deform the background geometry and are…
Considering that the effective theory of closed string tachyons can have worldsheet supersymmetry, as shown by Vafa, we study a worldline supersymmetric action in a FRW background, whose superpotential originates a tachyon scalar potential.…
We show that the perturbation of an N=2 supersymmetric gauge theory by a superpotential linear in the Kahler normal coordinates of the Coulomb branch, discussed in arXiv:0704.3613, is equivalent to the perturbation by Fayet-Iliopoulos…
Motivated by recent discussions of the string-theory landscape, we propose field-theoretic realizations of models with large numbers of vacua. These models contain multiple U(1) gauge groups, and can be interpreted as deconstructed versions…
We show that there exist supersymmetric Minkowski vacua on Type IIB toroidal orientifold with general flux compactifications where the RR tadpole cancellation conditions can be relaxed elegantly. Then we present a realistic Pati-Salam like…
We argue that tachyon-free type I string vacua with supersymmetry breaking in the open sector at the string scale can be interpreted, via S and T-duality arguments, as metastable vacua of supersymmetric type I superstring. The dynamics of…
String theory requires additional degrees of freedom to maintain world-sheet reparameterisation invariance at the quantum level. These are often interpreted as extra dimensions, beyond the 4 space-time. I discuss a class of quasi-realistic…
Recently, we proposed that the one-loop tadpole diagram in perturbative non-supersymmetric heterotic string vacua that contain an anomalous $U(1)$ symmetry, leads to an analog of the Fayet-Iliopoulos $D$-term in $\mathcal{N}=1$…
We consider examples of long-lived false vacua in quantum field theory that arise from so-called `universes'. These false vacua are protected by a $(d-1)$-form global symmetry, where $d$ is the dimension of spacetime. The lifetimes of the…
Few years ago, Cho and Vilenkin have proposed that topological defects can arise in symmetry breaking models without having degenerate vacua. These types of defects are known as vacuumless defects. In the present work, the gravitational…
We propose a new way of using geometric transitions to study metastable vacua in string theory and certain confining gauge theories. The gauge theories in question are N=2 supersymmetric theories deformed to N=1 by superpotential terms. We…
We discuss supersymmetry breaking mechanism at the level of low energy N=1 effective superstring actions that exhibit $SL(2,Z)_T$ target space modular duality or $SL(2,Z)_S$ strong-weak coupling duality. The allowed superpotential forms use…