Related papers: `Desert' in Energy or Transverse Space?
We discuss a possible compactification of a higher-dimensional gravitational theory, which give rise to a de Sitter or an accelerating universe, to the extent that it can describe a low energy limit of string theory. Such analysis can be…
String theoretical ideas might be relevant for particle physics model building. Ideally one would hope to find a unified theory of all fundamental interactions. There are only few consistent string theories in D=10 or 11 space-time…
Localized charged fields are a general feature of many realistic string compactifications. In four dimensions they can lead to a multitude of perturbatively-exact global symmetries. If spontaneously broken, they generate a new axiverse…
It has recently been argued that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua. This would imply that the current accelerated expansion of the universe is not driven by a cosmological constant (or vacuum energy) but by other means such as a…
In this scenario, a generic meta-stable deSitter vacuum site in the cosmic landscape in string theory has a very short lifetime. Typically, the smaller is the vacuum energy of a meta-stable site, the longer is its lifetime. This view of the…
One of the drawbacks of conventional grand unification scenarios has been that the unification scale is too high to permit direct exploration. In this paper, we show that the unification scale can be significantly lowered (perhaps even to…
The entropy of supersymmetric black holes in string theory compactifications can be related to that of a D- or M-brane system, which in many cases can be further reduced to a two-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT). For black holes in…
The apparent observation of dark energy poses problems for string theory. In de Sitter space, or in quintessence models, one cannot define a gauge-invariant S-matrix. We argue that eternal quintessence does not arise in weakly coupled…
We discuss the field theory of 3-brane probes in F-theory compactifications in two configurations, generalizing the work of Sen and of Banks, Douglas and Seiberg. One configuration involves several parallel 3-brane probes in F-theory…
We derive a perturbative expansion for space time entanglement entropy in string theory by comparing replica trick constructions on the target space and on the worldsheet. Requiring the two approaches to match implies a set of constrains on…
The dynamics of superstring, supergravity and M theories and their compactifications are probed by studying the various perturbation theories that emerge in the strong and weak coupling limits for various directions in coupling constant…
We consider a scalar field interaction with a cosmic string configuration in a flat 3-brane. The origin of this field is given by a compactification mechanism in the context of a 5-dimensional Brans-Dicke theory. We use the Cosmic Microwave…
Configurations of two or more branes wrapping different homology cycles of space-time are considered and the amount of supersymmetry preserved is analysed, generalising the analysis of multiple branes in flat space. For K3…
The so called `cosmic coincidence' problem seems to suggest a coupling between dark energy and dark matter. A possibility could be given by dark matter particles with masses depending exponentially on the scalar field associated to dark…
We use recently obtained 2-loop string coupling constants to analyze a class of string models based on orbifold compactification. Assuming weak coupling at the string scale and single-scale unification leads to restrictions on the spectrum…
We discuss dark energy, dark matter and the hierarchy problem in the context of a general non-commutative formulation of string theory. In this framework dark energy is generated by the dynamical geometry of the dual spacetime while dark…
This review talk focusses on some of the interesting developments in the area of superstring compactification that have occurred in the last couple of years. These include the discovery that ``mirror symmetric" pairs of Calabi--Yau spaces,…
A novel and powerful method is presented for the study of rare switching events in complex systems with multiscale energy landscapes. The method performs an umbrella sampling of the equilibrium distribution of the system in hyperplanes…
We consider a brane world residing in the interior region inside the horizon of the D3-brane. The horizon size then can be interpreted as the compactification size. The macroscopically large size of extra dimensions can be derived from the…
In the context of a toy model we discuss the phenomenon of colliding five-branes, with two of the extra space dimensions compactified on tori. In one of the branes (hidden world) the torus is magnetised. Assuming opposite-tension branes, we…