Related papers: Are Moduli Vacuum Expectation Values or Parameters…
Superstring theories are very promising theoretically, but the enormous landscape of string vacua and the (likely) very large underlying string scale imply that they may never be tested directly. Nevertheless, concrete constructions…
We consider spacetime-dependent solutions to string theory models with tadpoles for dynamical fields, arising from non-trivial scalar potentials. The solutions have necessarily finite extent in spacetime, and are capped off by boundaries at…
We consider the cosmological dynamics associated with volume weighted measures of eternal inflation, in the Bousso-Polchinski model of the string theory landscape. We find that this measure predicts that observers are most likely to find…
In this paper we investigate the Wightman function, the renormalized vacuum expectation values of the field square, and the energy-momentum tensor for a massive scalar field with general curvature coupling inside and outside of a…
The energy density of the vacuum, Lambda, is at least 60 orders of magnitude smaller than several known contributions to it. Approaches to this problem are tightly constrained by data ranging from elementary observations to precision…
We study vortex-strings in four-dimensional N=2 supersymmetric SU(Nc)xU(1) gauge theories with Nf hypermultiplets in the fundamental representation of SU(Nc) and general U(1) charges. If Nf>Nc, the vacuum is not gapped and the low-energy…
No physical measurement can be performed with infinite precision. This leaves a loophole in the standard no-go arguments against non-contextual hidden variables. All such arguments rely on choosing special sets of quantum-mechanical…
The goal of these lectures is to present an informal but precise introduction to a body of concepts and methods of interest in number theory and string theory revolving around modular forms and their generalizations. Modular invariance lies…
We define the notion of a marked moduli space as the parameter space of a physical theory together with all of its observables. In geometric examples, this coincides with the mathematical notion of Teichm\"uller space. We propose two new…
The supersymmetric flow equations describing the flow of moduli from infinity to the black hole horizon, and vice versa, are derived in the five-dimensional theories where the moduli space of the very special geometry has disjoint branches.…
In the correspondence between spectral problems and topological strings, it is natural to consider complex values for the string theory moduli. In the spectral theory side, this corresponds to non-Hermitian quantum curves with complex…
Two dimensional string theory is known to have an infinite dimensional symmetry, both in the continuum formalism as well as in the matrix model formalism. We develop a systematic procedure for computing the conserved charges associated with…
Maximally supersymmetric (p+1)-dimensional Yang-Mills theory at large N and finite temperature, with possibly compact spatial directions, has a rich phase structure. Strongly coupled phases may have holographic descriptions as black branes…
Quasinormal modes describe the relaxation of perturbed black holes and relate ringdown observables to the background geometry. In this work we study the problem in a de Sitter setting within a generalized Proca branch that generates an…
Moduli spaces of doubly periodic monopoles, also called monopole walls or monowalls, are hyperk\"ahler; thus, when four-dimensional, they are self-dual gravitational instantons. We find all monowalls with lowest number of moduli. Their…
In the conventional formulation, it is broadly accepted that simultaneous measurability and commutativity of observables are equivalent. However, several objections have been claimed that there are cases in which even nowhere commuting…
We show how non-trivial form fields can induce an effective potential for the dilaton and metric moduli in compactifications of type II string theory and M-theory. For particular configurations, the potential can have a stable minimum. In…
We investigate the no-boundary measure in the context of moduli stabilization. To this end, we first show that for exponential potentials, there are no classical histories once the slope exceeds a critical value. We also investigate the…
It has recently been conjectured that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua, and that quintessence explains the current epoch of accelerated cosmic expansion. A proposed, key prediction of this scenario is time-varying couplings in…
It is conjectured that strongly coupled, spatially noncommutative $\mathcal{N}=4$ Yang-Mills theory has a dual description as a weakly coupled open string theory in a near critical electric field, and that this dual theory is fully…