Related papers: A superspace approach to branes and supergravity
We relate Type IIB superstrings compactified to six dimensions on K3 to an eleven-dimensional theory compactified on $({\bf S}^1)^5/{\bf Z}_2$. Eleven-dimensional five-branes enter the story in an interesting way.
The recent interest in modified theories of gravity, involving some type of non-minimal coupling to the Ricci scalar, and the calculation of cosmological observables in the Einstein or the Jordan frame, motivate the formulation of these…
In this series of lectures I present a review of the geometric structures of supergravity in diverse dimensions mostly relevant to p-brane physics and to pinpoint the correspondence between the macroscopic and microscopic description of…
In the recent times a lot of effort has been devoted to improve our knowledge about the space of string theory vacua (``the landscape'') to find statistical grounds to justify how and why the theory selects its vacuum. Particularly…
String and M-theory contain a family of branes forming U-duality multiplets. In particular, standard branes with codimension higher than or equal to two, can be explicitly found as supergravity solutions. However, whether domain-wall branes…
We analyze various brane configurations corresponding to field theories in three, four and five dimensions. We find brane configurations which correspond to three dimensional N=2 and four dimensional N=1 supersymmetric QCD theories with…
The recent developments in string theory suggest that the space-time coordinates should be generalized to non-commuting matrices. Postulating this suggestion as the fundamental geometrical principle, we formulate a candidate for covariant…
There has been spectacular progress in the development of string and superstring theories since its inception thirty years ago. Development in this area has never been impeded by the lack of experimental confirmation. Indeed, numerous bold…
Bloch branes were introduced previously and are constructed in a system described by two real scalar fields coupled with gravity in (4, 1) dimensions in warped spacetime involving one extra dimension. This work investigates gravity on such…
Studying a quantum field theory involves a choice of space-time manifold and a choice of background for any global symmetries of the theory. We argue that many more choices are possible when specifying the background. In the context of…
The dynamics of superstring, supergravity and M theories and their compactifications are probed by studying the various perturbation theories that emerge in the strong and weak coupling limits for various directions in coupling constant…
We discuss general supersymmetric brane configurations in flux backgrounds of string and M-theory and derive a necessary condition for the worldvolume theory to be supersymmetric on a given curved manifold. This condition resembles very…
There have been many remarkable developments in our understanding of superstring theory in the past few years, a period that has been described as ``the second superstring revolution.'' Several of them are discussed here. The presentation…
Completeness of the spectrum of charged branes in a quantum theory of gravity naturally motivates the question of whether consistency of what lives on the branes can be used to explain some of the Swampland conditions. In this paper we…
We review exceptional field theories as the duality-covariant reformulation of maximal supergravity theories in ten and eleven dimensions, that make the underlying exceptional symmetries explicit. Beyond their structural role in unifying…
We construct an eleven-dimensional superspace with superspace coordinates and formulate a finite M-theory using non-anticommutative geometry. The conjectured M-theory has the correct eleven-dimensional supergravity low energy limit. We…
We consider a conformal system of a string and a particle defined in D=10+2 space-time dimensions. The extra time-like dimension is a gauge artifact and can be eliminated by choosing a gauge in which the SO(10,1) Lorentz symmetry is…
The strong coupling dynamics of string theories in dimension $d\geq 4$ are studied. It is argued, among other things, that eleven-dimensional supergravity arises as a low energy limit of the ten-dimensional Type IIA superstring, and that a…
In a recent paper, Polchinski and Strassler found a string theory dual of a gauge theory with reduced supersymmetry. Motivated by their approach, we perturb the $\N=8$ theory living on a set of N M2 branes to $\N=2$, by adding fermion mass…
A proposed duality between type IIB superstring theory on R^9 X S^1 and a conjectured 11D fundamental theory (``M theory'') on R^9 X T^2 is investigated. Simple heuristic reasoning leads to a consistent picture relating the various p-branes…