Related papers: Metastable strings at PTAs: classical stability an…
We consider the possibility of a bosonic (meta)stabilization of a cosmic gauge string loop due to the presence of a gas of low mass bosonic particles which become trapped within the string core. This boson gas exerts a pressure which tends…
We study the fate of U(1) strings embedded in a non-Abelian gauge theory with a hierarchical pattern of the symmetry breaking: G->U(1) at V->nothing at v, V>>v. While in the low-energy limit the Abrikosov-Nielsen-Olesen string (flux tube)…
Stability and instability bands in classical mechanics are well-studied in connection with systems such as described by the Mathieu equation. We examine whether such band structure can arise in classical field theory in the context of an…
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…
The presence of fields with negative mass-squared typically leads to some form of instability in standard field theories. The observation that, at least in the light-cone gauge, strings propagating in plane wave spacetimes can have…
We investigate the stability of superconducting strings as bound states of strings and fermion zero modes at both the classical and quantum levels. The dynamics of these superconducting strings can result in a stable configuration, known as…
The decay rate of metastable states is determined at high temperatures by thermal activation, whereas at temperatures close to zero quantum tunneling is relevant. At some temperature $T_{c}$ the transition from classical to…
Abelian non-topological solitons with Baryon and/or Lepton quantum numbers naturally appear in the spectrum of the minimal supersymmetric standard model. They arise as a consequence of the existence of flat directions in the potential…
Since it has been pointed out that physics beyond the Standard Model may be constrained by gravitational waves from cosmic strings, it has been more important to clarify in what cases cosmic strings are formed. We study the stability of the…
A connection between non-perturbative formulations of quantum gravity and perturbative string theory is exhibited, based on a formulation of the non-perturbative dynamics due to Markopoulou. In this formulation the dynamics of spin network…
The highly stable spin of neutron stars can be exploited for a variety of (astro-)physical investigations. In particular arrays of pulsars with rotational periods of the order of milliseconds can be used to detect correlated signals such as…
In a recent paper (see https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.108.095053), we have demonstrated that the 2023 PTA results, which hint at a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background at nanohertz frequencies, point towards a promising…
We show that stable local cosmic strings are a generic prediction of supersymmetric models where supersymmetry is broken at scales within a few orders of magnitude of the weak scale and is fed down to the observable sector by gauge…
I discuss conceptual issues associated with the presence of metastable AdS vacua in the string landscape. The geometry of the decay from one AdS to another is presented in detail, and various subtleties that are not present for flat or dS…
In this Thesis we investigate properties of stability, rigidity and unitarity of the string landscape in ten and lower dimensions. The dissertation explores these aspects by intertwining a detailed analysis of string vacua, with and without…
Flat directions are a generic feature of the scalar potential in supersymmetric gauge field theories. They can arise, for example, from D-terms associated with an extra abelian gauge symmetry. Even when supersymmetry is broken softly, there…
We show that spacetime curvature alone can classically stabilize black strings. Working within a consistent five-dimensional dilaton-gravity system with a flat brane, we find that sufficiently large black strings are classically stable when…
It is demonstrated that static, charged, spherically--symmetric black holes in string theory are classically and catastrophically unstable to linearized perturbations in four dimensions, and moreover that unstable modes appear for…
We show that metastable supersymmetry breaking is generic near certain enhanced symmetry points of gauge theory moduli spaces. Our model consists of two sectors coupled by a singlet and combines dynamical supersymmetry breaking with an…
Key issues of classical and quantum strings in gravitational plane waves, shock waves and spacetime singularities are synthetically understood. This includes the string mass and mode number excitations, energy-momentum tensor, scattering…