No Arabic abstract
We analyze the process of string vacuum destabilization due to instanton induced superpotential couplings which depend linearly on charged fields. These non-perturbative instabilities result in potentials for the D-brane moduli and lead to processes of D-brane recombination, motion and partial moduli stabilization at the non-perturbative vacuum. By using techniques of D-brane instanton calculus, we explicitly compute this scalar potential in toroidal orbifold compactifications with magnetized D-branes by summing over the possible discrete instanton configurations. We illustrate explicitly the resulting dynamics in globally consistent models. These instabilities can have phenomenological applications to breaking hidden sector gauge groups, open string moduli stabilization and supersymmetry breaking. Our results suggest that breaking supersymmetry by Polonyi-like models in string theory is more difficult than expected.
We study the recently proposed D-brane configuration [hep-th/0010105] modeling the quantum Hall effect, focusing on the nature of the interactions between the charged particles. Our analysis indicates that the interaction is repulsive, which it should be for the ground state of the system to behave as a quantum Hall liquid. The strength of interactions varies inversely with the filling fraction, leading us to conclude that a Wigner crystal is the ground state at small nu. For larger rational nu (still less than unity), it is reasonable to expect a fractional quantum Hall ground state.
We propose a simple non-perturbative formalism for false vacuum decay using functional methods. We introduce the quasi-stationary effective action, a bounce action that non-perturbatively incorporates radiative corrections and is robust to strong couplings. The quasi-stationary effective action obeys an exact flow equation in a modified functional renormalization group with a motivated regulator functional. We demonstrate the use of this formalism in a simple toy model and compare our result with that obtained in perturbation theory.
We point out that in some situations it is possible to use matrix model techniques a la Dijkgraaf-Vafa to perturbatively compute D-brane instanton effects. This provides an explanation in terms of stringy instantons of the results in hep-th/0311181. We check this proposal in some simple scenarios. We point out some interesting consequences of this observation, such as the fact that it gives a perturbative way of computing stringy multi-instanton effects. It also provides a further interpretation of D-brane instantons as residual instantons of higgsed supergroups.
The minimal embedding of the Standard Model in type I string theory is described. The SU(3) color and SU(2) weak interactions arise from two different collections of branes. The correct prediction of the weak angle is obtained for a string scale of 6-8 TeV. Two Higgs doublets are necessary and proton stability is guaranteed. It predicts two massive vector bosons with masses at the TeV scale, as well as a new superweak interaction.
We study the variations of the worldvolume fields in the non-Abelian action for multiple D-branes. Using T-duality we find that the embedding scalars transform non-trivially under NS-NS gauge transformations as delta X ~ [X, X] and prove that the non-Abelian Chern-Simons action is invariant under these transformations. Given that T-duality relates the (part of the) NS-NS transformation with (part of the) general coordinate transformations, we can get some insight in the structure of non-Abelian coordinate transformations.