Related papers: Towards a Big Crunch Dual
A brief review is given of three recent results concerning classical solutions of gravitational theories: (1) With asymptotically anti de Sitter boundary conditions, there are matter theories satisfying the positive energy theorem which…
Finding four-dimensional de Sitter spacetime solutions in string theory has been a vexing quest ever since the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Building on a recent analysis of bubble-nucleation in the decay of…
The topic of cosmic strings provides a bridge between the physics of the very small and the very large. They are predicted by some unified theories of particle interactions. If they exist, they may help to explain some of the largest-scale…
I discuss the role of spacetime supersymmetry in the interplay between strong/weak coupling duality and target space duality in string theory which arises in string/string duality. This can be seen via the construction of string soliton…
We study the origins of the five ten-dimensional ``matrix superstring'' theories, supplementing old results with new ones, and find that they all fit into a unified framework. In all cases the matrix definition of the string in the limit of…
Recently Hertog, Horowitz, and Maeda have argued that cosmic censorship can be generically violated in string theory in anti-de Sitter spacetime by considering a collapsing bubble of a scalar field whose mass saturates the…
We prove the weak cosmic censorship conjecture in $2+1$ spacetime dimensions for the circularly symmetric Einstein-scalar field system in the presence of a negative cosmological constant $\Lambda<0$. More precisely, we show that for any…
A weak version of the cosmic censorship hypothesis is implemented as a set of boundary conditions on exact semi-classical solutions of two-dimensional dilaton gravity. These boundary conditions reflect low-energy matter from the strong…
The heterotic string theory, compactified to four dimensions, has been conjectured to have a duality symmetry (S duality) that transforms the dilaton nonlinearly. If valid, this symmetry could provide an important means of obtaining…
Double Field Theory (DFT) is a low-energy effective theory of a manifestly $O(D,D)$ invariant formulation of the closed string theory when toroidally compactified dimensions are present. The theory is based on a doubled spacetime structure…
In a universe whose elementary constituents are point particles there does not seem to be any obvious mechanism for avoiding the initial singularities in physical quantities in the standard model of cosmology. In contrast in string theory…
A class of conformally flat and asymptotically anti-de Sitter geometries involving profiles of scalar fields is studied from the point of view of gauged supergravity. The scalars involved in the solutions parameterise the SL(N,R)/SO(N)…
We give two new analytical solutions to the low-energy string theory action that violate the weak cosmic censorship conjecture. They are classical charged solutions to the Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton theory in four dimensions that come in two…
String cosmology aims at providing a reliable description of the very early Universe in the regime where standard-model physics is no longer appropriate, and where we can safely apply the basic ingredients of superstring models such as…
We discuss in detail the $1+1$-dimensional superconformal field theory dual to type II string theory on $AdS_3\times S^3\times T^4$, emphasizing the string theoretic aspects of this duality. For one unit of NS-NS 5-brane flux ($Q_5=1$),…
We summarize our recent work on supergravity backgrounds dual to part of the Coulomb branch of N=1 theories constructed as marginal deformations of N=4 Yang-Mills. In particular, we present a summary of the behaviour of the heavy…
We consider vacuum solutions of four dimensional general relativity with $\Lambda < 0$. We numerically construct stationary solutions that asymptotically approach a boundary metric with differential rotation. Smooth solutions only exist up…
We conjecture the existence of two new non-gravitational six-dimensional string theories, defined as the decoupling limit of NS5-branes in the background of near-critical electrical two- and three-form RR fields. These theories are…
We are presenting the basic ingredients of a stringy mechanism able to resolve both the Hagedorn instabilities of finite temperature superstrings as well as the initial singularity of the induced cosmology in arbitrary dimensions. These are…
We study flows on the scalar manifold of N=8 gauged supergravity in five dimensions which are dual to certain mass deformations of N=4 super Yang--Mills theory. In particular, we consider a perturbation of the gauge theory by a mass term…