Related papers: Solving the strongly coupled 2D gravity III: Strin…
It is argued that the problems of the cosmological constant, stability and renormalizability of quantum gravity can be solved if the space-time manifold arises through spontaneous symmetry breaking. A ``pre-manifold" model is presented in…
The well known N=2 string theory describes self-dual gravity, as was shown by Ooguri and Vafa sometime ago. In search of a variant of this theory which would describe self-dual supergravity in 2+2 dimensions, we have constructed two new N=2…
The interaction of matter with gravity in two dimensional spacetimes can be supplemented with a geometrical force analogous to a Lorentz force produced on a surface by a constant perpendicular magnetic field. In the special case of constant…
A recent result concerning interacting theories of self-dual tensor gauge fields in six dimensions is generalized to include coupling to gravity. The formalism makes five of the six general coordinate invariances manifest, whereas the sixth…
The author has previously suggested that the ground state for 4-dimensional quantum gravity can be represented as a condensation of non-linear gravitons connected by Dirac strings. In this note we suggest that the low-lying excitations of…
We construct a few parameter approximate fixed point action for SU(2) pure gauge theory and subject it to scaling tests, via Monte Carlo simulation. We measure the critical coupling for deconfinement for lattices of temporal extent $N_t=2$,…
Coupling any interacting quantum mechanical system to gravity in one dimension requires the cosmological constant to belong to the matter energy spectrum and thus to be quantized, even though the gravity sector is free of any quantum…
We consider a class of cosmological solutions of d=4, N=2 supergravity theories coupled to vector multiplets. The solutions result from performing a compactification to three dimensions, where the theory reduces to a symmetric space sigma…
The restrictions of target--space duality are imposed at the perturbative level on the holomorphic Wilsonian couplings that encode certain higher-order gravitational interactions in $N=2, D=4$ heterotic string compactifications. A crucial…
This paper is a shortened version of the previous work hep-th/9907099: We propose a topological quantum field theory as a twisted candidate to formulate covariant matrix strings. The model relies on the octonionic or complexified instanton…
We calculate the low-lying glueball spectrum, some string tensions and some properties of topology and the running coupling for SU(N) lattice gauge theories in 3+1 dimensions. We do so for N = 2,3,...12, using lattice simulations with the…
New corrections to General Relativity are considered in the context of modified $f(R)$ gravity, that satisfy cosmological and local gravity constraints. The proposed models behave asymptotically as $R-2\Lambda$ at large curvature and show…
A set of physical operators which are responsible for touching interactions in the framework of c<1 unitary conformal matter coupled to 2D quantum gravity is found. As a special case the non-critical bosonic strings are considered. Some…
This is the second paper of a series of three. We construct effective open-closed superstring couplings by classically integrating out massive fields from open superstring field theories coupled to an elementary gauge invariant tadpole…
String theory, if it describes nature, is probably strongly coupled. In light of recent developments in string duality, this means that the ``real world'' should correspond to a region of the classical moduli space which admits no weak…
We recast the soft $S$-matrices on the celestial sphere as correlation functions of certain $2$-dimensional models of topological defects. In pointing out the double copy structure between the soft photon and soft graviton cases, we arrive…
We construct non-extremal dyonic string solutions in 6D minimal supergravity where the leading higher derivative corrections arise from either the type IIA string theory compactified on K3 or the heterotic string theory compactified on…
It is well known that gravity in 2+1 dimensions can be recast as Chern-Simons theory, with the gauge group given by the local isometry group, depending on the metric signature and the cosmological constant. Point particles are added into…
We analyse the Weak Gravity Conjecture for chiral four-dimensional F-theory compactifications with N=1 supersymmetry. Extending our previous work on nearly tensionless heterotic strings in six dimensions, we show that under certain…
We explicitly extract the structure of higher-derivative curvature-squared terms at genus 0 and 1 in the d=4 heterotic string effective action compactified on symmetric orbifolds by computing on-shell S-matrix superstring amplitudes. In…