Related papers: Nonperturbative Stability of Supergravity and Supe…
The stability of our vacuum is analyzed and several aspects concerning this question are reviewed. 1) In the standard Glashow-Weinberg-Salam (GWS) model we review the instability towards the formation of a bubble of lower energy density and…
In this contribution we review the ideas and results presented in the articles arXiv:2002.01764 and arXiv:2110.08276 where the decay of AdS vacua into bubbles of nothing is studied. We firstly consider AdS vacua in General Relativity with a…
We study moduli stabilization in the context of M-theory on compact manifolds with G2 holonomy, using superpotentials from flux and membrane instantons, and recent results for the Khaeler potential of such models. The existence of minima…
A type of scenario is considered where electrically charged vacuum bubbles, formed from degenerate or nearly degenerate vacuua separated by a thin domain wall, are cosmologically produced due to the breaking of a discrete symmetry, with the…
Recent progress in understanding modulus stabilization in string theory relies on the existence of a non-renormalization theorem for the 4D compactifications of Type IIB supergravity which preserve N=1 supersymmetry. We provide a simple…
Starting from the previously constructed effective supergravity theory below the scale of U(1) breaking in orbifold compactifications of the weakly coupled heterotic string, we study the effective theory below the scale of supersymmetry…
Motivated by recent discussions of the string-theory landscape, we propose field-theoretic realizations of models with large numbers of vacua. These models contain multiple U(1) gauge groups, and can be interpreted as deconstructed versions…
We consider a wide class of cascading gauge theories which usually lead to runaway behaviour in the IR, and discuss possible deformations of the superpotential at the bottom of the cascade which stabilize the runaway direction and provide…
We study essentially non-Abelian backgrounds in the five dimensional N=4 gauged SU(2)$\times$U(1) supergravity. Static configurations that are invariant under either the SO(4) spatial rotations or with respect to the SO(3) rotations and…
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 study how two moduli can be stabilized in a Minkowski/de Sitter vacuum for a wide class of string-inspired Supergravity models with an effective Fayet-like Supersymmetry breaking. It is shown under which conditions this mechanism can be…
It is shown how metastable de Sitter vacua might arise from heterotic M-theory. The balancing of its two non-perturbative effects, open membrane instantons against gaugino condensation on the hidden boundary, which act with opposing forces…
We discuss domain walls and vacuum energy density (cosmological constant) in N=1 gluodynamics and in non-supersymmetric large N orientifold field theories which have been recently shown to be planar equivalent (in the boson sector) to N=1…
In this paper, we present a series of supersymmetric models exhibiting an entirely new vacuum structure: towers of metastable vacua with higher and higher energies. As the number of vacua grows towards infinity, the energy of the highest…
We provide several consistency checks of confining dynamics in a recently conjectured holographic dual of a four-dimensional ${\cal N}=1$ supersymmetric gauge theory that flows from a conformal manifold in the UV to a finite set of…
A new approach to vacuum decay in quantum field theory, based on a simple variational formulation in field space using a tunneling potential, is ideally suited to study the effects of gravity on such decays. The method allows to prove in…
We study some cases in D=4 and in infinite-volume high dimensional theories when unbroken supersymmetry in the vacuum cannot guarantee Fermi-Bose degeneracy among excited states. In 4D we consider an example in which both supersymmetry and…
If a theory has more than one classically stable vacuum, quantum tunneling and thermal jumps make the transition between the vacua possible. The transition happens through a first order phase transition started by nucleation of a bubble of…
We review the status of domain walls in $N=1$ supergravity theories for both the vacuum domain walls as well as dilatonic domain walls. We concentrate on a systematic analysis of the nature of the space-time in such domain wall backgrounds…
In pure N=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills with gauge group SU(N), the domain walls which separate the N vacua have been argued, on the basis of string theory realizations, to be D-branes for the confining string. In a certain limit, this means…