Related papers: On Isolated Vacua and Background Independence
We study the vacuum structure of a class of Lorentz invariant field theories where the vacuum expectation values are not constant but are (phase) modulated. The vacua are classified into spatial, temporal, and light-like modulation types…
We argue that a generic instability afflicts vacua that arise in theories whose moduli space has large dimension. Specifically, by studying theories with multiple scalar fields we provide numerical evidence that for a generic local minimum…
It appears to be difficult within string theory to obtain genuine scale separation between spacetime and the internal sector. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism for scale-separated vacua which hinges on stringy effects that are…
We discuss the use of gauge fields to stabilize complex structure moduli in Calabi-Yau three-fold compactifications of heterotic string and M-theory. The requirement that the gauge fields in such models preserve supersymmetry leads to a…
It is widely believed, and axiomatically postulated in mathematical quantum field theory, that the vacuum is a unique vector state. The recent solution of the quantum Yang-Mills theory of the strong interaction revealed the presence of two…
In this letter we consider a charged black hole in a flux compactification of type IIB string theory. Both the black hole and the fluxes will induce potentials for the complex structure moduli. We choose the compact dimensions to be…
The space of four dimensional string and $M$ theory vacua with non-Abelian gauge symmetry, chiral fermions and unbroken supersymmetry beyond the electroweak scale appears to be a disconnected space whose different components represent…
Recently, two simple criteria were proposed to assess if vacua emerging from an effective scalar field theory are part of the string "landscape" or "swampland". The former are the vacua that emerge from string compactifications; the latter…
While the number of metastable landscape vacua in string theory is vast, the number of supermoduli vacua which lead to distinct low energy physics is even larger, perhaps infinitely so. From the anthropic perspective it is therefore…
In theories with moduli, extremal black holes behave such that for generic initial conditions, the distance traveled by the scalars from infinity to the horizon can grow with the size of the black hole. This, in turn, implies that larger…
de Sitter space-time has a one complex parameter family of invariant vacua for the theory of a free, massive scalar field. For most of these vacua, in an interacting scalar theory the one loop corrections diverge linearly for large values…
Vacuum compactifications may suffer from instabilities under small perturbations or tunnel effects; both are difficult to analyze. In this paper we consider the issue from a higher-dimensional perspective. We first look at how stability…
The possibility of a landscape of metastable vacua raises the question of what fraction of vacua are truly long lived. Naively any would-be vacuum state has many nearby decay paths, and all possible decays must be suppressed. An interesting…
We investigate the recent suggestion that a Minkowski vacuum is either absolutely stable, or it has a divergent decay rate and thus fails to have a locally Minkowski description. The divergence comes from boost integration over momenta of…
In a recent paper \cite{Acharya:2006ia} it was shown that in $M$ theory vacua without fluxes, all moduli are stabilized by the effective potential and a stable hierarchy is generated, consistent with standard gauge unification. This paper…
In this paper, we show that the presence of gauge fields in heterotic Calabi-Yau compacitifications causes the stabilisation of some, or all, of the complex structure moduli of the Calabi-Yau manifold while maintaining a Minkowski vacuum.…
We examine the vacuum structure of 4D effective theories of moduli fields in spacetime compactifications with quantized background fluxes. Imposing the no-scale structure for the volume deformations, we numerically investigate the…
If a theory has more than one classically stable vacuum, quantum tunneling and thermal jumps make the transition between the vacua possible. The transition happens through a first order phase transition started by nucleation of a bubble of…
In this work it is pointed out that some physical theories, even being themselves falsifiable, predict the existence of regions of spacetime which are not falsifiable with relation to each other due to their impossibility of mutually…
We derive formulas for counting certain classes of vacua in the string/M theory landscape. We do so in the context of the moduli space of M-theory compactifications on singular manifolds with G_2 holonomy. Particularly, we count the numbers…