Narrow Results

We review progress made over the past couple of years in the field of Swiss-Cheese Phenomenology involving a mobile spacetime filling D3-brane and stack(s) of fluxed D7-branes wrapping the "big" (as opposed to the "small") divisor in (the orientifold of (a) Swiss-Cheese Calabi–Yau. The topics reviewed include reconciliation of large volume cosmology and phenomenology, evaluation of soft supersymmetry breaking parameters, one-loop RG-flow equations' solutions for scalar masses, obtaining fermionic (possibly first two generations' quarks/leptons) mass scales in the -regime as well as (first two generations') neutrino masses (and their one-loop RG flow) of around an eV. The heavy sparticles and the light fermions indicate the possibility of "split SUSY" large volume scenario.

We compute the quantum gravitational contributions to the Standard Model (SM) effective potential and analyze their effects on the Higgs vacuum stability in the framework of effective field theory. Einstein gravity necessarily implies the existence of higher dimension ${\varphi }^6$ and ${\varphi }^8$ operators with novel couplings ${\eta }_{1/2}$ in the Higgs sector. The beta functions of these couplings are established and the impact of the gravity induced contributions on electroweak vacuum stability is studied. We find that the true minimum of the SM effective potential now lies below the Planck scale for almost the entire parameter space $({\eta }_{1/2}(m_{\mathrm{\text{t}}})>0.01)$. In addition quantum gravity is shown to contribute to the minimal value of the SM next-to-leading order (NLO) effective potential at the percent level. The quantum gravity induced contributions yield a metastable vacuum for a large fraction of the parameter space in the flowing couplings ${\eta }_{1/2}$.

This is a review of some recent works which demonstrate how the classical equations of gravity in AdS themselves hold the key to understand their holographic origin in the form of a strongly coupled large N QFT whose algebra of local operators can be generated by a few (single-trace) elements. I discuss how this can be realized by reformulating Einstein’s equations in AdS in the form of a nonperturbative RG flow that further leads to a new approach toward constructing strongly interacting QFTs. In particular, the RG flow can self-determine the UV data that are otherwise obtained by solving classical gravity equations and demanding that the solutions do not have naked singularities. For a concrete demonstration, I focus on the hydrodynamic limit in which case this RG flow connects the AdS/CFT correspondence with the membrane paradigm, and also reproduces the known values of the dual QFT transport coefficients.

This paper aims to provide a consistent, finite-valued, and mathematically well-defined reformulation of Feynman’s path-integral measure for quantum fields obtained by studying the Wiener stochastic process in the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space of quantum states. This reformulation will undoubtedly have a crucial role in formulating quantum gravity within a mathematically well-defined framework. In fact, this study is fundamentally different from any previous research on the relationship between Feynman’s path-integral and the Wiener stochastic process. In this research, we focus on the fact that the classic Wiener measure is no longer applicable in infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces due to fundamental differences between displacements in low and extremely high dimensions. Thus, an analytic norm motivated by the role of the fractal functions in the Wilsonian renormalization approach is worked out to properly characterize Brownian motion in the Hilbert space of quantum states on a compact flat manifold. This norm, the so-called fractal norm, pushes the rougher functions (physically the quantum states with higher energies) to the farther points of the Hilbert space until the fractal functions as the roughest ones are moved to infinity. Implementing the Wiener stochastic process with the fractal norm, results in a modified form of the Wiener measure called the Wiener fractal measure, which is a well-defined measure for Feynman’s path-integral formulation of quantum fields. Wiener fractal measure has a complicated formula of non-local terms but produces the Klein–Gordon action at the first order of approximation. Using complex integrals to compensate for the removal of non-local terms appearing in higher orders of approximation, the Wiener fractal measure turns into a complex measure and generates Feynman’s path-integral formulation of scalar quantum fields. This brings us to the main objective of this study. Finally, some various significant aspects of quantum field theory (such as renormalizability, RG flow, Wick rotation, regularization, etc.) are revisited by means of the analytical aspects of the Wiener fractal measure.