Related papers: Magnetic backgrounds and tachyonic instabilities i…
I argue that the ten dimensional non--supersymmetric tachyonic superstrings may serve as good starting points for the construction of viable phenomenological vacua. Thus, enlarging the space of possible solutions that may address some of…
Type II theories can be described as the endpoint of closed string tachyon condensation in certain orbifolds of supercritical type 0 theories. In this paper, we study solitons of this closed string tachyon and analyze the nature of the…
We compute a class of gauge invariant observables for marginal solutions and the tachyon vacuum. In each case we find that the observables are related in a simple way to the closed-string tadpole on a disk with appropriate boundary…
We study a bosonic open string coupled to a tachyonic background field $T[X]$ and find that the tachyon field can effectively be replaced by a configuration of D-branes placed at either the zeros or the critical points of $T[X]$, depending…
Motivated by the work of Polchinski and Strominger on type IIA theory, where the effect of non-trivial field strengths for p-form potentials on a Calabi-Yau space was discussed, we study four-dimensional heterotic string theory in the…
We conjecture that the end point of bulk closed string tachyon decay at any non-zero coupling, is the annihilation of space time by Witten's bubble of nothing, resulting in a topological phase of the theory. In support of this we present a…
After a brief review of critical string theory in trivial backgrounds we begin with introduction to strings in non--trivial backgrounds and noncritical string theory. In particular, we relate the latter to critical string theory in a linear…
A recently proposed \ell=\infty field theory model of tachyon dynamics for unstable bosonic D-branes has been shown to arise as the two-derivative truncation of (boundary)-string field theory. Using an \ell\to \infty limit appropriate to…
This paper analyzes the effect of curved closed string backgrounds on the stability of D-branes within boundary string field theory. We identify the non-local open string background that implements shifts in the closed string background and…
A review of various aspects of superstrings in background electromagnetic fields is presented. Topics covered include the Born-Infeld action, spectrum of open strings in background gauge fields, the Schwinger mechanism, finite-temperature…
Well-defined non-perturbative formulations of the physics of string theories, sometimes with D-branes present, were identified over a decade ago, from a careful study of double scaled matrix models. Following recent work which recasts some…
The $\mathbb{Z}_2\times \mathbb{Z}_2$ heterotic string orbifold yielded a large space of phenomenological three generation models and serves as a testing ground to explore how the Standard Model of particle physics may be incorporated in a…
Starting from the non-supersymmetric, tachyon-free orientifold of type 0 string theory, we construct four-dimensional brane world models with D6-branes intersecting at angles on internal tori. They support phenomenologically interesting…
We extend the pp-wave correspondence to a non supersymmetric example. The model is the type 0B string theory on the pp-wave R-R background. We explicitly solve the model and give the spectrum of physical states. The field theory counterpart…
Given a family of world-sheet superconformal field theories related by marginal deformation, we can formulate superstring field theory based on any of these world-sheet theories. Background independence is the statement that these different…
We study partially supersymmetric plane-wave like deformations of string theories and M-theory on brane backgrounds. These deformations are dual to nonlocal field theories. We calculate various expectation values of configurations of closed…
In its traditional form, the string field in closed string field theory is constrained by the level-matching condition, which is imposed beside the action. By analogy with the similar problem for the Ramond sector, it was understood by…
We treat RR flux backgrounds of type II string theory in the framework of closed superstring field theory based on the NSR formalism, focusing on two examples: (1) the pp-wave background supported by 5-form flux, and (2) $AdS_3\times…
In this paper we discuss D-branes in the Melvin background and its supersymmetric generalizations. In particular we determine the D-brane spectra in these backgrounds by constructing their boundary states explicitly, where some of the…
We provide world sheet non-supersymmetrical actions that describe the coupling of a bosonic string to the tachyon and massless states of both the type-B and type-O theories. The type-B theory is derived as a truncation and chiral doubling…