Related papers: Aspects of strings without spacetime supersymmetry
Lattice regularizations of the bosonic string allow no tachyons. This has often been viewed as the reason why these theories have never managed to make any contact to standard continuum string theories when the dimension of spacetime is…
Superstring/M-theory compactified on compact Ricci flat manifolds have recently been conjectured to exhibit instabilities whenever the metrics do not have special holonomy. We use worldsheet conformal field theory to investigate…
When supersymmetry is spontaneously broken at tree level, the spectrum of the heterotic string compactified on orbifolds of tori contains an infinite number of potentially tachyonic modes. We show that this implies instabilities of…
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 investigate unoriented strings and superstrings in two dimensions and their dual matrix quantum mechanics. Most of the models we study have a tachyon tadpole coming from the RP^2 worldsheet which needs to be cancelled by a…
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…
In this paper, we propose a possible new approach towards solving the gauge hierarchy problem without supersymmetry and without extra spacetime dimensions. This approach relies on the finiteness of string theory and the conjectured…
We conjecture that the end point of bulk closed string tachyon decay at any non-zero coupling, is the annihilation of space time by Witten's bubble of nothing, resulting in a topological phase of the theory. In support of this we present a…
We analyze the stability properties of a family of anti-de Sitter flux compactifications of the tachyon-free non-supersymmetric heterotic string in ten dimensions. In contrast with simpler such solutions, the solutions include two…
We consider worldsheet string theory on $Z_N$ orbifolds of $AdS_3$ associated with conical singularities. If the orbifold action includes a similar twist of $S^3$, supersymmetry is preserved, and there is a moduli space of vacua arising…
Few vacua are known for the three tachyon-free non-supersymmetric string theories. We find new classes of AdS backgrounds by focusing on spaces where the equations of motion reduce to purely algebraic conditions. Our first examples involve…
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…
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…
Spacetime properties of the tachyon of the p-adic string theory can be derived from a (non-local) action on the p-adic line Q_p, thought of as the boundary of the `worldsheet'. We show that a term corresponding to the background of the…
We discuss what information can be safely extracted from background independent off-shell string theory. The major obstacle in doing so is that renormalization conditions of the underlying world-sheet theories are not exactly known. To get…
Free scalar field theory in the sector with a large number of particles can be interpreted as bosonic string theory on anti-de Sitter space of vanishing radius. Different ways of writing the field theory Hamiltonian translate to different…
In this note we reexamine the possibility of constructing stable non-supersymmetric theories that exhibit an exponential density of states. For weakly coupled closed strings there is a general theorem, according to which stable theories…
In this thesis, two aspects of string theory are discussed, tensionless strings and supersymmetric sigma models. The equivalent to a massless particle in string theory is a tensionless string. Even almost 30 years after it was first…
Recent work has made clear that we have far more control over the dynamics of supersymmetric than non-supersymmetric theories. Here, I discuss some issues in dynamical supersymmetry breaking both in ordinary field theory and in string…
The spacetime physics of bulk closed string tachyon condensation is studied at the level of a two-derivative effective action. We derive the unique perturbative tachyon potential consistent with a full class of linearized tachyonic…