Related papers: Charged Cosmic String Nucleation in de Sitter Spac…
We consider a minisuperspace model for a closed universe with small and positive cosmological constant, filled with a massive scalar field conformally coupled to gravity. In the quantum version of this model, the universe may undergo a…
Quantum transitions among de Sitter and Minkowski spacetimes through bubble nucleation are revisited using the Hamiltonian formalism. We interpret tunnelling probabilities as relative probabilities: the ratio of the squared wave functionals…
False vacuum decay typically proceeds via the nucleation of spherical bubbles of true vacuum, described by $O(4)$ symmetric field configurations in Euclidean time. In this work, we investigate how the presence of cosmic strings can catalyze…
A synthetic report of the advances in the study of classical and quantum string dynamics in curved backgrounds is provided, namely: the new feature of multistring solutions; the effect of a cosmological constant and of spacial curvature on…
Theories of the cosmological constant fall into two classes, those in which the vacuum energy is fixed by the fundamental theory and those in which it is adjustable in some way. For each class we discuss key challenges. The string theory…
The evolution of the quantum wave packet describing an atom trapped in the surface-tip junction of the scanning tunneling microscope is investigated by using the time-dependent Schroedinger equation, and by a quasi-classical Hamiltonian…
In the first part of this talk, I consider some exact string solutions in curved spacetimes. In curved spacetimes with a Killing vector (timelike or spacelike), the string equations of motion and constraints are reduced to the Hamilton…
We provide a thorough exposition, including technical and numerical details, of previously published results on the quantum stabilization of cosmic strings. Stabilization occurs through the coupling to a heavy fermion doublet in a reduced…
We study the interaction of a massless quantized spinor field with the gravitational filed of N parallel static cosmic strings by using a perturbative approach. We show that the presence of more than one cosmic string gives rise to an…
We investigate the connection between curved spacetime and the emergence of string-instabilities, following the approach developed by Loust\'{o} and S\'{a}nchez for de Sitter and black hole spacetimes. We analyse the linearised equations…
We consider new cosmological solutions with a collapsing, an intermediate and an expanding phase. The boundary between the expanding (collapsing) phase and the intermediate phase is seen by comoving observers as a cosmological past (future)…
We argue that if de Sitter space is indeed represented by a finite dimensional quantum system, then semi-classical considerations, combined with the fundamental principles of quantum measurement theory, imply that any theoretical model of…
Chiral cosmic strings are produced naturally at the end of inflation in supersymmetric models where the symmetry is broken via a D-term. Consequently in such theories, where both inflation and cosmic strings contribute to the density and…
We identify a class of point-particle models that exhibit a target-space duality. This duality arises from a construction based on supersymmetric quantum mechanics with a non-vanishing central charge. Motivated by analogies to string…
In a quantum theory of gravity spacetime behaves classically when quantum probabilities are high for histories of geometry and field that are correlated in time by the Einstein equation. Probabilities follow from the quantum state. This…
The one-loop effective action for non-minimal scalar modified gravity on de Sitter background with a constant scalar field is found. The corresponding induced cosmological constant is evaluated. It is shown that quantum effects in…
This paper explores infrared quantum effects in the de Sitter space. The notion of "eternal manifolds" is introduced and it is shown that in most cases the de Sitter space doesn't belong to this class. It is unstable under small…
We investigate scaling and correlations of the energy and momentum in an evolving network of cosmic strings in Minkowski space. These quantities are of great interest, as they must be understood before accurate predictions for the power…
Starting with a study of the cosmological solution to the Einstein equations for the internal spacetime of an extreme supermassive cosmic string kink, and by evaluating the probability measure for the formation of such a kink in…
Recent results on classical and quantum strings in a variety of black hole and cosmological spacetimes, in various dimensions, are presented. The curved backgrounds under consideration include the $2+1$ black hole anti de Sitter spacetime…