Canonical transformations are ubiquitous in Hamiltonian mechanics, since they not only describe the fundamental invariance of the theory under phase-space reparameterisations, but also generate the dynamics of the system. In the first part of this work we study the symplectic structure associated with linear canonical transformations. After reviewi...
Does the value of the Higgs mass parameter affect the expectation value of local operators in the Standard Model? For essentially all local operators the answer to this question is "no", and this is one of the avatars of the hierarchy problem: nothing is "triggered" when the Higgs mass parameter crosses zero. In this letter, we explore settings in ...
We use exceptional field theory to compute Kaluza-Klein mass spectra around ${\rm AdS_{3}}$ vacua that sit in half-maximal gauged supergravity in three dimensions. The formalism applies to any vacuum that arises from a consistent truncation of higher-dimensional supergravity, no matter what symmetries are preserved. We illustrate its efficiency by ...
We identify a parametrically light dilaton by studying the perturbations of metastable vacua along a branch of regular supergravity backgrounds that are dual to four-dimensional confining field theories. The branch includes also stable and unstable solutions. The former encompass, as a special case, the geometry proposed by Witten as a holographic ...
Published in Journal of High Energy Physics
With one exception, all known non-supersymmetric AdS4 and AdS5 vacua of gauged maximal supergravities that descend from string and M theory have been shown to have modes with mass below the BF bound. The remaining non-supersymmetric AdS solution is perturbatively stable within gauged maximal supergravity, and hence appears to contradict recent conj...
We extend the previous analysis of (locally) asymptotically flat solutions of Kaluza-Klein (KK) theory by assuming that the dilaton charge is an independent parameter. This corresponds to a general nondegenerate matrix of charges within the geodesic sigma model approach and comes into contact with singular solutions of the four-dimensional Einstein...
A method is given to compute the stress-energy tensor for a massless minimally coupled scalar field in a spacetime where a black hole forms from the collapse of a spherically symmetric null shell in four dimensions. Part of the method involves matching the modes for the in vacuum state to a complete set of modes in Schwarzschild spacetime. The othe...
The Lukash metric is a homogeneous gravitational wave which approximates at late times the behaviour of a generic class of spatially homogenous cosmological models with monotonically decreasing energy density. Following pioneering work of Siklos, we provide a self-contained account of the geometry and global structure of the spacetime. The latter c...
We study the Vainshtein mechanism in the context of slowly rotating stars in scalar-tensor theories. While the Vainshtein screening is well established for spherically symmetric spacetimes, we examine its validity in the axisymmetric case for slowly rotating sources. We show that the deviations from the general relativity solution are small in the ...
We study (orientifolded) toric Calabi-Yau singularities in search for D-brane configurations which lead to dynamical supersymmetry breaking at low energy. By exploiting dimer techniques we are able to determine that while most realizations lead to a Coulomb branch instability, a rather specific construction admits a fully stable supersymmetry break...
