Related papers: Vacuum Tunneling by Cosmic Strings
We consider statistics of electronic transport in chaotic cavities where time-reversal symmetry is broken and one of the leads is weakly non-ideal, i.e. it contains tunnel barriers characterized by tunneling probabilities $\Gamma_i$. Using…
Experiments with evanescent modes and tunneling particles have shown that i) their signal velocity may be faster than light, ii) they are described by virtual particles, iii) they are nonlocal and act at a distance, iv) experimental…
We examine some novel physical consequences of the general structure of moduli spaces of string vacua. These include (1) finiteness of the volume of the moduli space and (2) chaotic motion of the moduli in the early universe. To fix ideas…
The tunneling potential formalism makes it easy to construct exact solutions to the vacuum decay problem in potentials with multiple fields. While some exact solutions for single-field decays were known, we present the first nontrivial…
This is the written version of a talk given at the Santa Barbara Workshop on Supersymmetry in December of 1995. It summarizes a collection of results on superstring cosmology obtained by the author and various collaborators, and contains…
Motivated by the possibility of a string landscape, we reexamine tunneling of a scalar field across single/multiple barriers. Recent investigations have suggested modifications to the usual picture of false vacuum decay that lead to…
We derive a prediction of dynamical tunneling rates from regular to chaotic phase-space regions combining the direct regular-to-chaotic tunneling mechanism in the quantum regime with an improved resonance-assisted tunneling theory in the…
We derive conditions for the existence of four-dimensional \N=1 supersymmetric flux vacua of massive type IIA string theory with general supergravity fluxes turned on. For an SU(3) singlet Killing spinor, we show that such flux vacua exist…
Vacuum polarization of a massive scalar field in the background of a two-dimensional version of a spinning cosmic string is investigated. It is shown that when the `radius of the universe' is such that spacetime is globally hyperbolic the…
The weakly coupled vacuum of $E_8\otimes E_8$ heterotic string theory remains an attractive scenario for phenomenolgy and cosmology. The particle spectrum is reviewed and the issues of gauge coupling unification, dilaton stabilization and…
In some string theories, e.g. SO(32) heterotic string theory on Calabi-Yau manifolds, a massless field with a tree level potential can acquire a tachyonic mass at the one loop level, forcing us to quantize the theory around a new background…
In this article, we propose a resolution to the paradox of apparent superluminal velocities for tunneling particles, by a careful treatment of temporal observables in quantum theory and through a precise application of the duality between…
We give an overview of the status of string cosmology. We explain the motivation for the subject, outline the main problems, and assess some of the proposed solutions. Our focus is on those aspects of cosmology that benefit from the…
Zero-point fluctuations in the background of a cosmic string provide an opportunity to study the effects of topology in quantum field theory. We use a scattering theory approach to compute quantum corrections to the energy density of a…
Recent developments in string theory have reinforced the notion that the space of stable supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric string vacua fills out a ``landscape'' whose features are largely unknown. It is then hoped that progress in…
The tunneling rate, with exact prefactor, is calculated to first order in $\hbar$ for an empty closed Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) universe with decaying cosmological term $\Lambda \sim R^{-m}$ ($R$ is the scale factor and $m$ is a…
We study the behaviour and consequences of cosmic string networks in contracting universes. They approximately behave during the collapse phase as a radiation fluids. Scaling solutions describing this are derived and tested against…
The interplay between chaotic tunneling and dynamical localization in mixed phase space is investigated. Semiclassical analysis using complex classical orbits reveals that tunneling through torus regions and transport in chaotic regions are…
Supersymmetric states in M-theory are mapped after compactification to perturbatively non-supersymmetric states in type IIA string theory, with the supersymmetric parts being encoded in the non-perturbative section of the string theory. An…
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…