Related papers: Vacuum Stability in Heterotic M-Theory
We investigate the possibility of false vacuum decay in $N=1$ supergravity theories. By establishing a Bogomol'nyi bound for the energy density stored in the domain wall of the $O(4)$ invariant bubble, we show that supersymmetric vacua…
Phenomenological implications of the volume of the Calabi-Yau threefolds on the hidden and observable M-theory boundaries, together with slope stability of their corresponding vector bundles, constrain the set of Kaehler moduli which give…
We study a four-dimensional effective theory of the five-dimensional (5D) gauged supergravity with a universal hypermultiplet and perturbative superpotential terms at the orbifold fixed points. Among eight independent isometries of the…
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…
We investigate the conditions for a QCD axion to coexist with stabilised moduli in string compactifications. We show how the simplest approaches to moduli stabilisation give unacceptably large masses to the axions. We observe that solving…
A scenario of moduli stabilisation based on the interplay between closed and open string sectors is explored in a bottom-up approach. We study N=1 effective supergravities inspired by type IIB orientifold constructions that include…
We conduct a systematic search for a viable string/M-theory cosmology, focusing on cosmologies that include an era of slow-roll inflation, after which the moduli are stabilized and the Universe is in a state with an acceptably small…
We investigate the viability of F-term uplift in heterotic M-theory. With this aim we explore a natural ingredient of heterotic compactifications, namely vector bundle moduli. It is shown that it is generically possible to obtain stable de…
We investigate the moduli stabilization in string gas compactification. We first present a numerical evidence showing the stability of the radion and the dilaton. To understand this numerical result, we construct the 4-dimensional effective…
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…
Tree-level moduli stabilization via geometric and non-geometric fluxes in type IIB orientifolds on Calabi-Yau manifolds is investigated. The focus is on stable non-supersymmetric minima, where all moduli are fixed except for some massless…
The Standard Model electroweak vacuum has been found to be metastable, with the true stable vacuum given by a large, phenomenologically unacceptable vacuum expectation value $\approx M_{P}$. Moreover, it may be unstable in an inflationary…
We use the F-term dynamical supersymmetry breaking models with metastable vacua in order to uplift the vacuum energy in the KKLT moduli stabilization scenario. The main advantage compared to earlier proposals is the manifest supersymmetric…
We study a new mechanism to dynamically break supersymmetry in the E8xE8 heterotic string. As discussed recently in the literature, a long-lived, meta-stable non-supersymmetric vacuum can be achieved in an N=1 SQCD whose spectrum contains a…
We demonstrate that flux compactifications of type IIA string theory can classically stabilize all geometric moduli. For a particular orientifold background, we explicitly construct an infinite family of supersymmetric vacua with all moduli…
We provide a thorough exposition of recent results on the quantum stabilization of cosmic strings. Stabilization occurs through the coupling to a heavy fermion doublet in a reduced version of the standard model. The study combines the…
An old idea for explaining the hierarchy is strong gauge dynamics. We show that such dynamics {\it also} stabilises the moduli in $M$ theory compactifications on manifolds of $G_2$-holonomy {\it without} fluxes. This gives stable vacua with…
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 compactification from the 11-dimensional Horava-Witten orbifold to 5-dimensional heterotic M-theory on a Schoen Calabi-Yau threefold is reviewed, as is the specific $SU(4)$ vector bundle leading to the "heterotic standard model" in the…
The matter sector of four-dimensional effective supergravity models obtained from the weakly coupled heterotic string contains many moduli. In particular, flat directions of the D-term part of the scalar potential in the presence of an…