​David Kutasov

Professor
Dept. of Physics, Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College

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Research

My main research focus in recent years was on a number of questions in field and string theory. One is the dynamics of strongly coupled field theories such as Quantum Chromodynamics, and in particular qualitative phenomena such as confinement and chiral symmetry breaking. Another is supersymmetry breaking in stable and metastable vacua, and the associated question of vacuum selection in the early universe (why may the universe end up in a non-supersymmetric metastable state, when there are stable supersymmetric ones). String theory appears to be a very fruitful source of ideas for tackling these problems, and I have been involved in exploring them.

Some other topics in string theory I have been studying are the evolution of black holes into highly excited strings as their mass decreases, the physics associated with cosmological singularities such as the big bang, the study of time dependent backgrounds that involve branes accelerating in an external gravitational field, holography in different types of backgrounds, infrared instabilities, and low dimensional toy models of string theory.

Generally speaking, I am interested in developing better tools for analyzing the consequences of string theory in various situations, which seems to be the main obstacle for making predictions about nature. I am also interested in using the dynamical mechanisms that were discovered in string and field theory in recent years to explain potential new results in particle physics experiments and cosmology.

Selected Publications

• "Some Exact Results on Tachyon Condensation in String Field Theory'', D. Kutasov, M. Marino and G. Moore, hep-th/0009148, JHEP 0010 (2000) 045.
• "String propagation in the presence of cosmological singularities", B. Craps, D. Kutasov and G. Rajesh, JHEP 0206, 053 (2002); [arXiv:hep-th/0205101].
• "A New Hat For The c=1 Matrix Model", M. R. Douglas, I. R. Klebanov, D. Kutasov, J. Maldacena, E. Martinec, N. Seiberg, hep-th/0307195.
• "Central charges and U(1)R symmetries in N = 1 super Yang-Mills", D. Kutasov, A. Parnachev and D. A. Sahakyan, JHEP 0311, 013 (2003); [arXiv:hep-th/0308071].
• "D-Brane Dynamics Near NS5-Branes", D. Kutasov, hep-th/0405058.
• "NJL and QCD from String Theory", E. Antonyan, J.A. Harvey, S. Jensen, D. Kutasov, hep-th/0604017.
• "Gauge symmetry and supersymmetry breaking from intersecting branes", A. Giveon and D. Kutasov, Nucl. Phys. B778, 129 (2007) [arXiv:hep-th/0703135].
• "Seiberg Duality in Chern-Simons Theory", A. Giveon and D. Kutasov, Nucl. Phys. B812, 1 (2009); [arXiv:0808.0360 [hep-th]].
• "D-Terms and Supersymmetry Breaking from Branes", A. Giveon, D. Kutasov, J. McOrist and A. B. Royston, Nucl. Phys. B822, 106 (2009); [arXiv:0904.0459 [hep-th]].
• "Dynamical Vacuum Selection in String Theory", D.Kutasov, O.Lunin, J.McOrist and A. B. Royston, Nucl. Phys. B833, 64 (2010); [arXiv:0909.3319 [hep-th]].