Related papers: Supercritical stability, transitions and (pseudo)t…
Experimental discovery of the dilaton would provide strong evidence for string theory. A light dilaton could show up in current tests of the inverse square law for gravity at sub-millimeter distances. In the large extra dimension scenario,…
On an unstable D-brane, the rolling of the tachyon away from the maximum of its potential is described by time-dependent solutions in string theory. Subsequent analysis leads to an understanding of physics around the tachyon vacuum in terms…
We consider two established supergravities which are known to provide the low-energy effective description of either superstring theory or M-theory: the six-dimensional theory of Romans, and the maximal supergravity in seven dimensions. We…
Lattice regularizations of the bosonic string allow no tachyons. This has often been viewed as the reason why these theories have never managed to make any contact to standard continuum string theories when the dimension of spacetime is…
We show that an exact, non-critical-string cosmological configuration of dilaton and graviton backgrounds, found in [1], constitutes an infrared stable fixed point of an exact Wilsonian renormalization group equation.
Some recent developments in the weakly-coupled heterotic string phenomenology are reviewed. We discuss several important issues such as dilaton/moduli stabilization, supersymmetry breaking (by hidden-sector gaugino condensation), gauge…
Macroscopic fundamental and Dirichlet strings have several potential instabilities: breakage, tachyon decays, and confinement by axion domain walls. We investigate the conditions under which metastable strings can exist, and we find that…
Quantum theory of 2d gravity is examined by including a special quantum correction, which corresponds to the open string loop corrections and provides a new conformal anomaly for the corresponding $\sigma$ model. This anomaly leads to the…
We construct colliding plane wave solutions in higher dimensional gravity theory with dilaton and higher form flux, which appears naturally in the low energy theory of string theory. Especially, the role of the junction condition in…
String theory relies on spacetime supersymmetry to guarantee the existence of stable vacua. In this review, we survey two features of non-supersymmetric strings that challenge both aspects: the appearance of tachyons and worldsheet…
We consider quantization of open string theories in linear dilaton and constant antisymmetric tensor backgrounds and discuss the noncommutativity of space-time coordinates arising in such theories, including their relationship with…
We study the role of rolling tachyons in the cosmological model with dilatonic gravity. In the string frame, flat space solutions of both initial-stage and late-time are obtained in closed form. In the Einstein frame, we show that every…
Over the past three decades, considerable effort has been devoted to studying the rich and diverse phenomenologies of heterotic strings exhibiting spacetime supersymmetry. Unfortunately, during this same period, there has been relatively…
Alternative gauge choices for worldsheet supersymmetry can elucidate dynamical phenomena obscured in the usual superconformal gauge. In the particular example of the tachyonic $E_8$ heterotic string, we use a judicious gauge choice to show…
Models of closed superstrings in certain curved NS-NS magnetic flux backgrounds are exactly solvable in terms of free fields. They interpolate between free superstring theories with periodic and antiperiodic boundary conditions for fermions…
It has been shown recently that by turning on a large noncommutativity parameter, the description of tachyon condensation in string theory can be drastically simplified. We reconsider these issues from the standpoint of string field theory,…
We construct a Galilean invariant non-gravitational closed string theory whose excitations satisfy a non-relativistic dispersion relation. This theory can be obtained by taking a consistent low energy limit of any of the conventional string…
The force densities exerted on a localised material system by linearised interaction with fields of axionic and dilatonic type are shown to be describable very generally by relatively simple expressions that are well behaved for fields of…
We consider classical and quantum strings in the conformally invariant background corresponding to the SL(2,R) WZWN model. This background is locally anti-de Sitter spacetime with non-vanishing torsion. Conformal invariance is expressed as…
String theory, if it describes nature, is probably strongly coupled. As a result, one might despair of making any statements about the theory. In the framework of a set of clearly spelled out assumptions, we show that this is not…