Related papers: Topological String Defect Formation During the Chi…

Structure formation in 1+1 dimensions is considered, with emphasis on the effects of shell-crossing. The breakdown of the perturbative expansion beyond shell-crossing is discussed, and it is shown, in a simple example, that the perturbative…

Kibble and Zurek have provided a unifying causal picture for the appearance of topological defects like cosmic strings or vortices at the onset of phase transitions in relativistic QFT and condensed matter systems respectively. There is no…

We study a geometric transition in non-perturbative topological string. We consider two cases. One is the geometric transition from the closed topological string on the local $\mathcal{B}_{3}$ to the closed topological string on the…

A brief review of the string percolation model and its results are presented together with the comparison to experimental data. First, it is done an introduction to the quark-gluon phase diagram and the lattice results concerning the…

Elementary point charge excitations in 3+1D topological phases can condense along a line and form a descendant excitation called the Cheshire string. Unlike the elementary flux loop excitations in the system, Cheshire strings do not have to…

We consider the evolution of a network of strings in an expanding universe, allowing for the formation of junctions between strings of different tensions. By explicitly including, in the velocity-dependent evolution equations for the…

We show that in certain theories with topologically trivial quotient space of spontaneously broken gauge symmetry there can exist topologically stable strings that carry nonabelian gauge flux. These objects result from the ``accidental''…

We discuss the semi-classical perturbation spectra produced in the massless fields of the low energy string action in a pre big bang type scenario. Axion fields may possess an almost scale-invariant spectrum on large scales dependent upon…

Columnar crystals contain defects in the form of vacancy/interstitial loops or strings of vacancies and interstitials bounded by column ``heads'' and ``tails''. These defect strings are oriented by the columnar lattice and can change size…

We review the construction of chiral four-dimensional compactifications of type IIA string theory with intersecting D6-branes. Such models lead to four-dimensional theories with non-abelian gauge interactions and charged chiral fermions. We…

We attempt to describe the interplay of confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in QCD by using the string model. We argue that in the quasi-abelian picture of confinement based on the condensation of magnetic monopoles and the dual…

Topological defects attract much recent interest in high-energy and condensed matter physics because they encode (non-invertible) symmetries and dualities. We study codimension-1 topological defects from a hamiltonian point of view, with…

In this article, prepared for the book "The birth of string theory", I recall the sequence of ideas which led to non-critical strings and gauge/strings duality. I also comment on some promising future directions.

Topological semimetals in three dimensions display band-touchings at points (Weyl or Dirac semimetals) or nodal lines in the Brillouin zone. Weyl semimetals can occur with internal symmetries only (time-reversal ${\cal T}$, charge…

Tricritical Ising (TCI) phase transition is known to occur in several interacting spin and Majorana fermion models and is described in terms of a supersymmetric conformal field theory (CFT) with central charge $c=7/10$. The field content of…

We propose a class of field theories featuring solitonic solutions in which topological defects can end when they intersect other defects of equal or higher dimensionality. Such configurations may be termed ``Dirichlet topological…

We investigate the peculiar velocity field due to long cosmic strings in several cosmological models and analyse the influence of a nonscaling behaviour of the string network, which is expected in open cosmological models or models with a…

We have earlier shown that cosmic strings moving through the plasma at the time of a first order quark-hadron transition in the early universe can generate large scale baryon inhomogeneities. In this paper, we calculate detailed structure…

Spontaneous breaking of global symmetries can produce ``Alice'' strings: line defects which make unbroken symmetries multivalued, induce apparent charge violation via Aharonov-Bohm interactions, and form point defects when twisted into…

We investigate the Hagedorn transitions of string networks with Y-junctions as may occur, for example, with (p,q) cosmic superstrings. In a simplified model with three different types of string, the partition function reduces to three…