Related papers: Semi-local Cosmic Strings and the Cosmological Con…
We find a new class of cosmic string solutions with non-vanishing magnetic flux of $\mathcal{N}=1$, D=4 supergravity with a cosmological constant and coupled to any number of Maxwell and scalar multiplets. We show that these magnetic cosmic…
In no--scale supergravity global symmetries protect local supersymmetry and a zero value for the cosmological constant. We consider the breakdown of these symmetries and present a minimal SUGRA model motivated by the multiple point…
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…
We study a cosmic string solution of an N=1-supersymmetric version of the Cremmer-Scherk-Kalb-Ramond (CSKR) Lagrangian coupled to a vector superfield by means of a topological mass term. The 2-form gauge potential is proposed to couple…
We propose a string-inspired model which correlates several aspects of particle physics and cosmology. Inspired by the flat directions and the absence of adjoint Higgs representations found in typical string models, we consider a no-scale…
We report on a large scale numerical study of networks of semilocal cosmic strings in flat space in the parameter regime in which they are perturbatively stable. We find a population of segments with an exponential length distribution and…
We provide a thorough exposition of recent results on the quantum stabilization of cosmic strings. Stabilization occurs through the coupling to a heavy fermion doublet in a reduced version of the standard model. The study combines the…
In this paper we show how quantum corrections, although perturbatively small, may play an important role in the analysis of the existence of some classical models. This, in fact, appears to be the case of static, uniform--density models of…
Cosmic strings are considered in two types of gauged sigma models, which generalize the gravitating Abelian Higgs model. The two models differ by whether the U(1) kinetic term is of the Maxwell or Chern-Simons form. We obtain the…
This thesis is essentially organized in two parts: braneworlds and higher dimensional black objects with a cosmological constant. We present solitonic braneworld models where the brane are inflating and with the presence of a cosmological…
The mystery of the cosmological constant is probably the most pressing obstacle to significantly improving the models of elementary particle physics derived from string theory. The problem arises because in the standard framework of low…
We study the cosmology of a string derived supersymmetric flipped $SU(5)$ model in the context of free-fermionic heterotic constructions that allow full calculability of the effective supergravity in perturbation theory around the fermionic…
A Chern--Simons system in $2+1$ dimensions invariant under local Lorentz rotations, $SU(2)$ gauge transformations, and local $\mathcal{N}=2$ supersymmetry transformations is proposed. The field content is that of $(2+1)$-gravity plus an…
We argue that traditional methods of compactification of string theory make it very difficult to understand how the cosmological constant becomes zero. String inspired models can give zero cosmological constant after fine tuning but since…
The Standard Model is the low-energy limit of a microscopic theory which includes extra dimensions and new symmetries. A part of my thesis consisted in constructing a new class of models with two extra dimensions. We showed that these…
We present the simplest possible model for a semi-local string defect in which a U(1) gauged subgroup of an otherwise global SU(2) is broken to produce local cosmic strings endowed with current-carrying properties. Restricting attention to…
We study the quantum stabilization of a cosmic string by a heavy fermion doublet in a reduced version of the standard model. We show that charged strings, obtained by populating fermionic bound state levels, become stable if the…
We study the properties of classical vortex solutions in a non-Abelian gauge theory. A system of two adjoint Higgs fields breaks the SU(2) gauge symmetry to $Z_2$, producing 't Hooft-Polyakov monopoles trapped on cosmic strings, termed…
In this paper we extend the Cosmological Constant Seesaw treatment of hep-th/0602112 to String/M-Theory where the cosmological constant is finite. We discuss how transitions between different $\lambda$, one of Planckian vacuum energy, can…
We reanalyse the computation of the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ at two loops in recently proposed Superstring models without massless gravitini, both in the theta-function based formalism and by a detailed computation in the more…