Quantum Gravity, Flavour Vacua and Supersymmetry

I review a novel and non-perturbative way of breaking Supersymmetry in the flavour sector of electrically neutral particles, as a result of flavour mixing in the presence of stringy quantum gravity space-time foam backgrounds that violate Lorentz and CPT symmetries. In these models, part of the mixing may itself be induced dynamically by the interactions of the flavoured particles with the space-time foam.Comment: Invited talk at Corfu 2010 School and Workshops, September 2010, Corfu EISA (Greece

CPT Violation: What and where to look for

In this review I classify the possible ways of CPT violation, and I describe briefly their phenomenology, in both terrestrial and astrophysical experiments, including antimatter factories, neutral mesons and neutrinos, and discuss the various sensitivities. I also pay attention to disentangling genuine quantum-gravity induced CPT violation from `fake' violation due to ordinary matter effects. A particularly interesting situation arises when the breaking of CPT invariance is through unitarity violations, in the sense of the matter theory being viewed as an effective field theory, entangled with decoherening quantum gravity ``environments''. In such a case the quantum mechanical CPT operator is ill defined due to another mathematical theorem, and one has novel effects associated with CPT Violating modifications of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen type correlations of entangled meson states in B and phi meson factories.Comment: 9 pages, latex, uses special macros, Invited plenary talk in LEAP05, 16-22 May 2005, Bonn/GSI and Julich, German

Some Aspects of String Cosmology and the LHC

I discuss some (unconventional) aspects of String Cosmology of relevance to supersymmetric dark matter searches at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. In particular, I analyse the role of time-dependent dilaton fields in relaxing some of the stringent constraints that characterise minimal supersymmetric models in standard cosmology. I also study briefly CPT-violating aspects of brane Universe models with space-time brane defects at early epochs and their potential relevance to the observed Baryon Asymmetry.Comment: 12 pages pdflatex, uses special macros.Plenary talk at the 1st International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics 2012, Kolymbari (Crete, Greece), June 10-16 2012, to appear in the Proc. EPJ WEB of Conferences, updated reference

Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry in the Universe via String-Inspired CPT Violation at Early Eras

In four-space-time dimensional string/brane theory, obtained either through compactification of the extra spatial dimensions, or by appropriate restriction to brane worlds with three large spatial dimensions, the rich physics potential associated with the presence of non-trivial Kalb-Ramond (KR) axion-like fields has not been fully exploited so far. In this talk, I discuss a scenario whereby such fields produce spontaneous Lorentz- and CPT-violating cosmological backgrounds over which strings propagate, which in the early Universe can lead to Baryogenesis through Leptogenesis in models with heavy right-handed neutrinos.Comment: 6 pages Latex, one figure, uses special macros; Invited talk at the International Workshop on CPT and Lorentz Symmetry in Field Theory, University of the Algarve, Faro (Portugal), July 6-7 2017. To appear in the Proceedings (Journal of Phys. Conf. Series (IOP)

Cell Microtubules as Cavities: Quantum Coherence and Energy Transfer?

A model is presented for dissipationless energy transfer in cell microtubules due to quantum coherent states. The model is based on conjectured (hydrated) ferroelectric properties of microtubular arrangements. Ferroelectricity is essential in providing the necessary isolation against thermal losses in thin interior regions, full of ordered water, near the tubulin dimer walls of the microtubule. These play the role of cavity regions, which are similar to electromagnetic cavities of quantum optics. As a result, the formation of (macroscopic) quantum coherent states of electric dipoles on the tubulin dimers may occur. Some experiments, inspired by quantum optics, are suggested for the falsification of this scenario.Comment: 7 pages LATEX. Invited talk at the 2000 International Conference on Mathematics and Engineering Techniques in Medicine and Biological Sciences, Monte Carlo Resort, Las Vegas (USA), June 26-29 2000, published in the proceeding