Related papers: Solving the strongly coupled 2D gravity III: Strin…
At a critical ``chiral'' coupling, topologically massive gravity with a negative cosmological constant exhibits several unusual features, including the emergence of a new logarithmic branch of solutions and a linearization instability for…
Talk given at the 26th Workshop: ``From Superstrings to Supergravity", Erice - Sicily, 5-12 December 1992. We review the superconformal properties of 2d matter coupled to gravity, and extensions thereof. Focusing on topological strings, we…
We show that the central charges that group theory allows in the (2,0) supersymmetry translations algebra arise from a string and a 3-brane by commuting two supercharges. We show that the net force between two such parallel strings…
Nonperturbative treatments of the UV limit of pure gravity suggest that it admits a stable fixed point with positive Newton's constant and cosmological constant. We prove that this result is stable under the addition of a scalar field with…
We discuss how concepts such as geodesic length and the volume of space-time can appear in 2d topological gravity. We then construct a detailed mapping between the reduced Hermitian matrix model and 2d topological gravity at genus zero.…
We show how to formulate a lattice gauge theory whose naive continuum limit corresponds to two-dimensional (Euclidean) quantum gravity including a positive cosmological constant. More precisely the resultant continuum theory corresponds to…
This Ph.D. thesis investigates effective field and string theories in which supersymmetry is realized and broken in various ways. Chapter 1 addresses effective theories with nonlinearly realized supersymmetry, constructed using the…
Quantum gravity is studied nonperturbatively in the case in which space has a boundary with finite area. A natural set of boundary conditions is studied in the Euclidean signature theory, in which the pullback of the curvature to the…
We compute N-point correlation functions of pure vertex operator states(DK states) for minimal models coupled to gravity. We obtain agreement with the matrix model results on analytically continuing in the numbers of cosmological constant…
The experimental data of the past decade suggests that the quantum gravity vacuum should possess two key ingredients. The existence of three generations and their embedding in SO(10) representations. The Z2XZ2 orbifold of the heterotic…
We consider, in five dimensions, the effective action from heterotic string which includes quantum gravity corrections up to (a')^2. The expansion, in the string frame, is in terms of |a'R|, where R is the scalar curvature and uses the…
We extend the system of ungauged N=2, d=4 supergravity coupled to vector multiplets and hypermultiplets with 2-form potentials. The maximal number of 2-form potentials that one may introduce is equal to the number of isometries of either…
We consider $\mathcal{N}=2$ superconformal quiver gauge theories in four dimensions and evaluate the chiral/anti-chiral correlators of single-trace operators. We show that it is convenient to form particular twisted and untwisted…
We consider (d_0+2)-dimensional configurations with global strings in the two extra dimensions and a flat metric in d_0 dimensions, endowed with a warp factor e^{2\gamma} depending on the distance l from the string center. All possible…
Two dimensional quantum gravity coupled to a conformally invariant matter field of central charge c=n/2, is represented, in a discretized version, by n independent Ising spins per cell of the triangulations of a random surface. The matrix…
We construct new 1/2 supersymmetric solutions in D=3, N=2, matter coupled, U(1) gauged supergravities and study some of their properties. In the most general case they represent a string superposed with gravitational and Chern-Simons…
We show how to make a topological string theory starting from an $N=4$ superconformal theory. The critical dimension for this theory is $\hat c= 2$ ($c=6$). It is shown that superstrings (in both the RNS and GS formulations) and critical…
We discuss topological theories, arising from the general $\mathcal{N}=2$ twisted gauge theories. We initiate a program of their study in the Gromov-Witten paradigm. We re-examine the low-energy effective abelian theory in the presence of…
String theory provides the only consistent framework so far that unifies all interactions including gravity. We discuss gravity and cosmology in string theory. Conventional notions from general relativity like geometry, topology etc. are…
We show that the usual fixed point for 3-d rigid string with topological term appears to be a trivial one, consisting of two decoupled conformal field theories. We further argue that by involving an additional term allowed by symmetries and…