Related papers: Explaining the Electroweak Scale and Stabilizing M…
Theories with compact extra dimensions are sometimes unstable to decay into a bubble of nothing -- an instability resulting in the destruction of spacetime. We investigate the existence of these bubbles in theories where the moduli fields…
We present a novel strategy to systematically study complex-structure moduli stabilization in Type IIB and F-theory flux compactifications. In particular, we determine vacua in any asymptotic regime of the complex-structure moduli space by…
We conjecture that in a consistent supergravity theory with non-vanishing gravitino mass, the limit $m_{3/2}\rightarrow 0$ is at infinite distance. In particular one can write $M_{\mathrm{tower}} \sim m_{3/2}^\delta$ so that as the…
We investigate the stability of the Standard-Model Electroweak (EW) vacuum in the presence of Planck-scale suppressed operators of the type $\phi^{2n}/M^{2n-4}_{\rm P}$ that involve the Higgs field $\phi$ and could in principle be induced…
We discuss the possible generation of R-parity violating bilinear terms $ \mu_i\bar L_i H_2$ in both cases of gravity and gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking. Some phenomenological aspects are reviewed. In particular for scenario where $…
A new family of $D=4$ $\mathcal{N}=8$ gauged supergravities is introduced, consisting in a mixture of Scherk-Schwarz and dyonic CSO gaugings that involves the trombone scaling symmetry. A specific theory in this class is shown to admit…
We construct purely non-perturbative anti-de Sitter vacua in string theory which, on uplifting to a de Sitter (dS) one, have a decay time many orders of magnitude smaller than those of standard constructions, such as the KKLT and LVS…
We explore a family of generalised scalar-tensor theories that exhibit self-tuning to low scale anti de Sitter vacua, even in the presence of a large cosmological constant. We are able to examine the linearised fluctuations about these…
We uncover a surprising universal soft behaviour (USB) of a de Sitter (dS) S-matrix for \textit{all} exceptional effective field theories (EFTs) in dS space, stemming from the recently proposed generalised energy conservation (GEC)…
We address the possibility of false vacuum decay in $N=1$ supergravity theories, including those corresponding to superstring vacua. By establishing a Bogomol'nyi bound for the energy density stored in the domain wall of the $O(4)$…
Type I string theory in the presence of internal magnetic fields provides a concrete realization of split supersymmetry. To lowest order, gauginos are massless while squarks and sleptons are superheavy. For weak magnetic fields, the correct…
We present a novel paradigm that allows to define a composite theory at the electroweak scale that is well defined all the way up to any energy by means of safety in the UV. The theory flows from a complete UV fixed point to an IR fixed…
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…
We construct models in which electroweak symmetry is spontaneously broken by supersymmetric strong dynamics at the TeV scale. The order parameter is a composite of scalars, and the longitudinal components of the W and Z are strongly-coupled…
It has been notoriously difficult to construct a meta-stable de Sitter (dS) vacuum in string theory in a controlled approximation. This suggests the possibility that meta-stable dS belongs to the swampland. In this paper, we propose a…
We propose a deformation principle of gauge theories in three dimensions that can describe topologically stable self-dual gauge fields, i.e., vacua configurations that in spite of their masses do not deform the background geometry and are…
We consider dark matter in a minimal extension of the Standard Model (SM) which breaks electroweak symmetry dynamically and leads to a complete unification of the SM and technicolor coupling constants. The unification scale is determined to…
The classical moduli space M of a supersymmetric gauge theory with trivial superpotential can be stratified according to the unbroken gauge subgroup at different vacua. We apply known results about this stratification to obtain the W \neq 0…
We study the electroweak vacuum stability in Type I seesaw models for 3 generations of neutrinos in scenarios where the right-handed neutrinos have explicit bare mass terms in the Lagrangian and where these are dynamically generated through…
Using the linear multiplet formulation for the dilaton superfield, we construct an effective lagrangian for hidden-sector gaugino condensation in string effective field theories with arbitrary gauge groups and matter. Nonperturbative string…