Related papers: Supergravity flows and D-brane stability

We review the theory and phenomenology of effective supergravity theories based on orbifold compactifications of the weakly-coupled heterotic string. In particular, we consider theories in which the four-dimensional theory displays target…

We present a duality procedure that relates conventional four-dimensional matter-coupled N=1 supergravities to dual formulations in which auxiliary fields are replaced by field-strengths of gauge three-forms. The duality promotes specific…

Compactifications of type II theories on Calabi-Yau threefolds including electric and magnetic background fluxes are discussed. We derive the bosonic part of the four-dimensional low energy effective action and show that it is a…

We analyze certain brane bound states in M-theory and their descendants in type IIA string theory, all involving 3-form or 2-form background fluxes. Among them are configurations which represent NCYM, NCOS and ODp-theories in the scaling…

We investigate special compactifications of the heterotic string for which the space of half-BPS states is, in a natural way, a representation of various subgroups of the Conway group. These compactifications provide a useful framework for…

We study N=2 four-dimensional flux vacua describing intrinsic non-perturbative systems of 3 and 7 branes in type IIB string theory. The solutions are described as compactifications of a G(ravity) theory on a Calabi Yau threefold which…

In this work we derive non-singular BPS string solutions from an action that captures the essential features of a D-brane-anti-D-brane system compactified to four dimensions. The model we consider is a supersymmetric abelian Higgs model…

We investigate, at the microscopic level, the compatibility between D-term potentials from world-volume fluxes on D7-branes and non-perturbative superpotentials arising from gaugino condensation on a different stack of D7-branes. This is…

The subject of this thesis are various ways to construct four-dimensional quantum field theories from string theory. In a first part we study the generation of a supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, coupled to an adjoint chiral superfield,…

States on the Coulomb branch of N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory are studied from the point of view of gauged supergravity in five dimensions. These supersymmetric solutions provide examples of consistent truncation from type IIB supergravity in…

This paper lays groundwork for the detailed study of the non-trivial renormalization group flow connecting supersymmetric fixed points in four dimensions using string theory on AdS spaces. Specifically, we consider D3-branes placed at…

Identification of string junction states of pure SU(2) Seiberg-Witten theory as B-branes wrapped on a Calabi-Yau manifold in the geometric engineering limit is discussed. The wrapped branes are known to correspond to objects in the bounded…

We calculate the supergravity fields sourced by a D-brane with a null travelling wave from disk amplitudes in type IIB string theory compactified on T^4 x S^1. The amplitudes reproduce all the non-trivial features of the previously known…

We make a proposal for a bosonic field theory in twelve dimensions that admits the bosonic sector of eleven-dimensional supergravity as a consistent truncation. It can also be consistently truncated to a ten-dimensional Lagrangian that…

We argue that type II string theories contain unstable NS4 branes, which descend from a conjectured unstable M4 brane of M-theory. Assuming that an M2 brane can arise in M5 brane/anti-brane annihilation, the unstable M4 brane, and also an…

We discuss a novel strategy to construct 4D N=0 stable flux vacua of type II string theory, based on the existence of BPS bounds for probe D-branes in some of these backgrounds. In particular, we consider compactifications where D-branes…

Much has been learned about string theory over the last few years by studying properties of cycles and branes in a given background geometry. Here we discuss three situations (quantum volume, attractor flows/D-brane stability, and dynamical…

We study the classical geometry associated to fractional D3-branes of type IIB string theory on R^4/Z_2 which provide the gravitational dual for N=2 super Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions. As one can expect from the lack of conformal…

I explain two applications of the relationship between four dimensional N=1 supersymmetric gauge theories, zero dimensional gauged matrix models, and geometric transitions in string theory. The first is related to the spectrum of BPS domain…

We first review standard results of the compactification of type IIA and IIB supergravities on a Calabi-Yau threefold and illustrate mirror symmetry. Then we compactify the same theories on a class of generalized Calabi-Yau manifolds called…