Related papers: A Proposal for Altering the Unification Scale in S…
Thermal duality is a relationship between the behaviour of heterotic string models of the $E(8)x E(8)$ or $SO(32)$ types at inversely related temperatures, a variant of T duality in the Euclidean regime. This duality would have consequences…
We study the boundary state associated with the decay of an unstable D-brane with uniform electric field, 1>e>0 in the string units. Compactifying the D-brane along the direction of the electric field, we find that the decay process is…
String breaking is a central dynamical process in theories featuring confinement, where a string connecting two charges decays at the expense of the creation of new particle-antiparticle pairs. Here, we show that this process can also be…
We consider brane-world scenarios embedded into string theory. We find that the D-brane backreaction induces a large increase in the open string's proper length. Consequently the stringy nature of elementary particles can be detected at…
Thermal inflation was proposed as a mechanism to dilute the density of cosmological moduli. Thermal inflation is driven by a complex scalar field possessing a large vacuum expectation value and a very flat potential, called a `flaton'. Such…
The Hagedorn transition in non-commutative open string theory (NCOS) is relatively simple because gravity decouples. For NCOS theories in no more than five spacetime dimensions, the Hagedorn transition is second order, and the high…
We study the unification scale and gauge coupling constant in 4D string theory. We show that the fine structure constant is determined by the dimension of the hidden gauge group and only $SU(6)$ and $SO(9)$ are consistent with minimal…
The separation of a heavy quark and antiquark pair leads to the formation of a tube of flux, or "string", which should break in the presence of light quark-antiquark pairs. This expected zero-temperature phenomenon has proven elusive in…
We investigate the thermodynamic properties of D-brane-anti-D-brane pairs and non-BPS D-branes on the basis of boundary string field theory. We calculate the finite temperature effective potential of N D-brane-anti-D-brane pairs in a…
We discuss the transition between black strings and fundamental strings in the presence of a compact dimension, $\mathbb{S}^1_z$. In particular, we study the Horowitz-Polchinski effective field theory in $\mathbb{R}^d\times\mathbb{S}^1_z$,…
We suggest that some of the remarkable results on stringy dynamics which have been found recently indicate the existence of another dynamical length scale in string theory that, at weak coupling, is much shorter than the string scale. This…
We consider the phase transition of a string with tension $\eps_1$ to a string with a smaller tension $\eps_2$ at finite temperature. For sufficiently small temperatures the transition proceeds through thermally catalyzed quantum tunneling,…
In this talk I will discuss the role of finite temperature quantum corrections in string cosmology and show that they can lead to a stabilization mechanism for the volume moduli. I will show that from the higher dimensional perspective this…
Using the techniques of two dimensional conformal field theory we construct time dependent classical solutions in open string theory describing the decay of an unstable D-brane in the presence of background electric field, and explicitly…
We investigate the quantum statistical properties of the confining string connecting a static fermion-antifermion pair in the massive Schwinger model. By analyzing the reduced density matrix of the subsystem located in between the fermion…
We probe the effective worldvolume theory of a set of coinciding D-branes by switching on constant electro-magnetic fields on them. The comparison of the mass spectrum predicted by string theory with the mass spectrum obtained from the…
We study the thermal breakage of a discrete one-dimensional string, with open and fixed ends, in the heavily damped regime. Basing our analysis on the multidimensional Kramers escape theory, we are able to make analytical predictions on the…
We explain how perturbative string theory can be viewed as an exactly renormalizable Weyl invariant quantum mechanics in the worldsheet representation clarifying why string scattering amplitudes are both finite and unambiguously normalized…
We consider low energy, non-relativistic scattering of two Dirichlet zero-branes as an exercise in quantum mechanics. For weak string coupling and sufficiently small velocity, the dynamics is governed by an effective U(2) gauge theory in…
A high-resolution investigation of the electron spectra close to the metal-to-insulator transition in dynamic mean-field theory is presented. An all-numerical, consistent confirmation of a smooth transition at zero temperature is provided.…