Related papers: Tachyons and Misaligned Supersymmetry in Orientifo…
We investigate the D-brane contents of asymmetric orbifolds. Using T-duality we find that the consistent description of open strings in asymmetric orbifolds requires to turn on background gauge fields on the D-branes. We derive the…
We consider 'orbifold' and 'orientifold' field theories from the dual closed string theory side. We argue that a necessary condition for planar equivalence to hold is the absence of a closed string tachyonic mode in the dual…
In the presence of internal magnetic fields, a D9 brane can acquire a D5 (or anti-D5) R-R charge, and can therefore contribute to the corresponding tadpole. In the resulting vacua, supersymmetry is generically broken and tachyonic…
Starting from a peculiar orientifold projection proposed long ago by Angelantonj and Cardella, we elaborate on a novel perturbative scenario that involves only D-branes, together with the two types of orientifold planes ${\rm O}_{\pm}$ and…
We consider string theory in maximally supersymmetric type IIB plane wave background with constant five form Ramond-Ramond flux (RR plane wave). It is argued that there exists a universal sector of string configurations independent of the…
We consider the type 0 theories, obtained from the closed NSR string by a diagonal GSO projection which excludes space-time fermions, and study the D-branes into these theories. The low-energy dynamics of N coincident D-branes is governed…
We find that tachyonic orbifold examples of AdS/CFT have corresponding instabilities at small radius, and can decay to more generic gauge theories. We do this by computing a destabilizing Coleman-Weinberg effective potential for twisted…
In a remarkable paper, Dienes discovered that the absence of physical tachyons in closed string theory is intimately related to oscillations in the net number of bosonic minus fermionic degrees of freedom, a pattern predicted by an…
Intersecting D-brane models and their T-dual magnetic compactifications yield attractive models of particle physics where magnetic flux plays a twofold role, being the source of fermion chirality as well as supersymmetry breaking. A…
A system of k Neveu-Schwarz (NS) 5-branes of type II string theory with one transverse direction compactified on a circle admits various unstable D-brane systems, - some with geometric instability arising out of being placed at a point of…
String theory relies on spacetime supersymmetry to guarantee the existence of stable vacua. In this review, we survey two features of non-supersymmetric strings that challenge both aspects: the appearance of tachyons and worldsheet…
We consider closed string tachyons localized at the fixed points of noncompact nonsupersymmetric orbifolds. We argue that tachyon condensation drives these orbifolds to flat space or supersymmetric ALE spaces. The decay proceeds via an…
We construct D=4 Type I vacua with massless content remarkably close to that of the standard model of particle physics. They are tachyon-free non-supersymmetric models which are obtained starting with a standard D=4, N=1 compact Type IIB…
We study superstrings with orientifold projections and with generalized open string boundary conditions (D-branes). We find two types of consistency condition, one related to the algebra of Chan-Paton factors and the other to cancellation…
In this review we describe our current understanding of the properties of open string tachyons on an unstable D-brane or brane-antibrane system in string theory. The various string theoretic methods used for this study include techniques of…
The stabilisation of the dilaton and volume in tree-level flux compactifications leads to model independent and thus very powerful existence and stability criteria for dS solutions. In this paper we show that the sizes of cycles wrapped by…
Starting from a previously collected set of tachyon-free closed strings, we search for N=2 minimal model orientifold spectra which contain the standard model and are free of tachyons and tadpoles at lowest order. For each class of…
"Brane supersymmetry breaking" is a peculiar phenomenon that can occur in perturbative orientifold vacua. It results from the simultaneous presence, in the vacuum, of non-mutually BPS sets of BPS branes and orientifolds, which leave behind…
We study the dynamics of type I strings on Melvin backgrounds, with a single or multiple twisted two-planes. We construct two inequivalent types of orientifold models that correspond to (non-compact) irrational versions of Scherk-Schwarz…
It is well-known that Scherk-Schwarz compactifications in string theory have a tachyon in the closed string spectrum appearing for a critical value of a compact radius. The tachyon can be removed by an appropriate orientifold projection in…