Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 96-98).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Baylor University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 124-130).

No description available.

This thesis is concerned with the study of cosmic strings. We studied the values for the Higgs mass and string coupling for which the gravitational effect of an infinite cosmic string in the context of the Einstein theory is not only locally but also globally weak. We conclude this happens for strings formed at scales less or equal to the Planck one with Higgs mass being less or equal to the boson vectorial mass. Then we examined the metric of an isolated self-gravitating abelian-Higgs vortex in dilatonic gravity for arbitrary coupling of the vortex fields to the dilaton. We looked for solutions in both massless and massive dilaton gravity. We compared our results to existing metrics for strings in Einstein and .Jordan-Brans-Dicke theories. We explored the generalisation of Bogomolnyi arguments for our vortices and commented on the effects on test particles. We then included the presence of an axion field and examined the metric of an isolated self-gravitating axionic-dilatonic string. Finally we studied dilatonic strings through black hole solutions in string theory. We concluded that the horizon of non-extreme charged black holes supports the long-range fields of the Nielsen-Olesen string that can be considered as black hole hair and whose gravitational effect is in general the production of a conical deficit into the metric of the black hole background. We also concluded that the effect of the dilaton on the horizon of these black holes is to generate an additional charge.

In this thesis we employ string perturbation theory in toroidal orbifold models to study aspects of supersymmetry breaking in type IIB string theory. First, we determine the dependence of physical Yukawa couplings on blow-up moduli in models with D3-branes at orbifold singularities. Blow-up moduli are scalar fields describing the size of small blow-up cycles in the compactification geometry. In models implementing moduli stabilisation these fields can acquire F-terms and break supersymmetry. We examine the moduli-dependence of physical Yukawa couplings at string tree-level by computing disk correlation functions involving a Yukawa interaction of visible sector fields and an arbitrary number of blow-up moduli. We perform the calculation for one blow-up insertion explicitly and find that the correlation function vanishes if the blow-up modulus is associated with a small cycle distant to the visible sector. For more than one blow-up insertion we show that all such correlation functions are exponentially suppressed by the compactification volume. We explain how these results are relevant to suppressing soft terms to scales parametrically below the gravitino mass. Further, we determine corrections to holomorphic Yukawa couplings on D3-branes at an orbifold singularity due to non-perturbative effects such as gaugino condensation on a stack of D7-branes. This can be done by calculating a one-loop threshold correction to the gauge coupling on the D7-branes. We show that, if present, the new contributions to Yukawa couplings are not aligned with the tree-level couplings. As the new Yukawa couplings contribute to soft A-terms they are sources of flavour-changing neutral currents. Last we discuss an effect unrelated to supersymmetry breaking. We show that orbifold models with D3-branes at orbifold singularities can exhibit kinetic mixing of different massless Abelian factors. For this to be possible, the relevant U(1) factors have to be associated with more than one orbifold singularity.

No description available.

The central theme of this thesis is the application of mirror symmetry to the study of the arithmetic geometry of Calabi-Yau threefolds. It formulates a conjecture about the properties of the limit mixed Hodge structure at the large complex structure limit of an arbitrary mirror threefold, which is supported by a two-parameter example of a self-mirror Calabi-Yau threefold. It further studies the connections between this conjecture with Voevodsky's mixed motives. This thesis also studies the connections between the conifold transition and Beilinson's conjecture on the values of the L-functions at integral points. It carefully studies the arithmetic geometry of the conifold in the mirror family of the quintic Calabi-Yau threefold and its L-function, which is shown to provide a very interesting example to Beilinson's conjecture.

This Thesis is concerned with three particular aspects of extended cosmic strings and domain walls in cosmology: their dynamics, gravitation and interaction with a black hole. In Chapter 3, we study the dynamics of an abelian-Higgs cosmic string. We find its equations of motion from an effective action and compare, for three test trajectories, the resulting motion with that observed in the Nambu-Gotō approximation. We also present a general argument showing that the corrected motion of any string is generically antirigid. We pursue the investigation of the dynamics of topological defects in Chapter 5, where we find (from integrability conditions rather than an effective action) the effective equations governing the motion of a gravitating curved domain wall. In Chapter 4 we investigate the spacetime of a gravitating domain wall in a theory with a general potential V(ɸ). We show that, depending on the gravitational coupling e of the scalar ɸ, all nontrivial solutions fall into two categories interpretable as describing respectively domain wall and false vacuum-de Sitter solutions. Wall solutions cannot exist beyond a value (^4)(_3)ɛmax, and vacuum-de Sitter solutions are unstable to decaying into wall solutions below ɛmax at ɛmax we observe a phase transition between the two types of solution. We finally specialize for the Goldstone and sine-Gordon potentials. In Chapter 6 we consider a Nielsen-Olesen vortex whose axis passes through the centre of an extremal Reissner-Nordstr0m black hole. We examine in particular the existence of piercing and expelled solutions (where the string respectively does and does not penetrate the black hole's horizon) and determine that while thin strings penetrate the horizon — and therefore can be genuinely called hair — thick strings are expelled; the two kinds of solution are separated by a phase transition.

Cette thèse intitulée « Studies of fractional D-branes in the gauge/gravity correspondence & Flavored Chern-Simons quivers for M2-branes » se place dans le cadre de la théorie des cordes, en physique théorique. Elle consiste en une introduction suivie de deux parties. Dans l'introduction sont résumés les différents outils de théorie des cordes qui seront utilisés. <p>\ / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished