Related papers: Neighboring Valley in the String Landscape
Dynamical supersymmetry breaking in a long-lived meta-stable vacuum is a phenomenologically viable possibility. This relatively unexplored avenue leads to many new models of dynamical supersymmetry breaking. Here, we present a surprisingly…
A nearly-massless, slowly-rolling scalar field $\phi$ may provide most of the energy density of the current universe. One potential difficulty with this idea is that couplings to ordinary matter, even if suppressed by the Planck scale,…
Spacetime supersymmetry is widely believed to play an important role in most fundamental theories of physics, and is usually invoked in order to address problems of naturalness. In this paper, we examine the question of whether…
String theory has no parameter except the string scale $M_S$, so the Planck scale $M_\text{Pl}$, the supersymmetry-breaking scale, the EW scale $m_\text{EW}$ as well as the vacuum energy density (cosmological constant) $\Lambda$ are to be…
We consider new cosmological solutions with a collapsing, an intermediate and an expanding phase. The boundary between the expanding (collapsing) phase and the intermediate phase is seen by comoving observers as a cosmological past (future)…
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…
We show that if there is a realistic 4-d string, the dilaton and moduli supermultiplets will generically acquire a small mass O(m_{3/2}), providing the only vacuum-independent evidence of low-energy physics in string theory beyond the…
This is the written version of a talk given at the Santa Barbara Workshop on Supersymmetry in December of 1995. It summarizes a collection of results on superstring cosmology obtained by the author and various collaborators, and contains…
Presently there is preliminary observational evidence that the cosmological constant might be non zero, and hence that our Universe is eternally accelerating (de Sitter). This poses fundamental problems for string theory, since a scattering…
In this paper we construct a stringy embedding of the dark bubble model of an expanding 4D cosmology with the help of branes rotating in extra dimensions. The universe rides a bubble which has nucleated in an unstable higher dimensional…
The energy density of the universe today may be dominated by the vacuum energy of a slowly rolling scalar field. Making a quantum expansion around such a time dependent solution is found to break fundamental symmetries of quantum field…
As famously observed by Ooguri and Vafa nearly twenty years ago, scalar field moduli spaces in quantum gravity appear to exhibit various universal features. For instance, they seem to be infinite in diameter, have trivial fundamental group,…
We argue that, for generic string compactifications, dark energy is likely to signal the beginning of the end of our universe, perhaps even through decompactification, with possible implications for the cosmological coincidence problem.…
A consistent theoretical description of physics at high energies requires an assessment of vacuum stability in either the Standard Model or any extension of it. Especially supersymmetric extensions allow for several vacua and the choice of…
In string theory with flux compactifications, anthropic selection for structure formation from a discretuum of vacuum energy values provides at present our only understanding of the tiny yet positive value of the cosmological constant. We…
We consider the question of asymptotic observables in cosmology. We assume that string theory contains a landscape of vacua, and that metastable de Sitter regions can decay to zero cosmological constant by bubble nucleation. The asymptotic…
We review recent developments in the construction of heterotic and type II string field theories and their various applications. These include systematic procedures for determining the shifts in the vacuum expectation values of fields under…
We argue that the hidden sector potential energy is generically of order the intermediate scale although the true cosmological constant does vanish. This would significantly change the predicted values of soft parameters for a variety of…
The concept of supersymmetry in a quantum mechanical system is extended, permitting the recognition of many more supersymmetric systems, including very familiar ones such as the free particle. Its spectrum is shown to be supersymmetric,…
It is becoming increasingly clear that metastable vacua may play a prominent role in supersymmetry-breaking. To date, however, this idea has been realized only in models where non-perturbative dynamics complicates the analysis of…