Related papers: Cosmic strings and Natural Inflation

Cosmic superstrings are produced at the end of brane inflation. Their properties are similar to cosmic strings arising in grand unified theories. Like cosmic strings they can give rise to a primordial magnetic field, as a result of vortical…

We examine the consequences of recent developments on Fayet-Iliopoulos (FI) terms for D-term inflationary models. There is currently no known way to couple constant FI terms to supergravity consistently; only field-dependent FI terms are…

I elaborate on a link between the string--scale breaking of supersymmetry that occurs in a class of superstring models and the onset of inflation. The link rests on spatially flat cosmologies supported by a scalar field driven by an…

We construct a string-inspired nonsingular cosmological scenario in which an inflaton field is driven up the potential before the graceful exit by employing a low-energy string effective action with an orbifold compactification. This sets…

Current data exclude cosmic strings as the primary source of primordial density fluctuations. However, in a wide class of inflationary models, strings can form at later stages of inflation and have potentially detectable observational…

After discussing some old (and not-so-old) entropy bounds both for isolated systems and in cosmology, I will argue in favour of a "Hubble entropy bound" holding in the latter context. I will then apply this bound to recent developments in…

This is a short review of string cosmology. We wish to connect string-scale physics as closely as possible to observables accessible to current or near-future experiments. Our possible best hope to do so is a description of inflation in…

Motivated by the fact that cosmological perturbations of inflationary quantum origin were born Gaussian, the search for non-Gaussianities in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies is considered as the privileged probe of…

For suitable cosmological backgrounds, thermal fluctuations of a gas of strings can generate a scale-invariant spectrum of cosmological fluctuations without requiring a phase of inflationary expansion. We highlight the key points of this…

We use analytic calculations of the post-recombination gravitational effects of cosmic strings to estimate the resulting CMB power spectrum, bispectrum and trispectrum. We place a particular emphasis on multipole regimes relevant for…

We investigate the nucleation of circular cosmic strings in models of generalized inflationary universes with an accelerating scale factor. We consider toy cosmological models of a smooth inflationary exit and transition into a flat…

We confront the predicted effects of hybrid inflationary models on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with three years of Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) observations. Using model selection, we compare the ability of a simple…

The apparent alignment of the cosmic microwave background multipoles on large scales challenges the standard cosmological model. Scalar field inflation is isotropic and cannot account for the observed alignment. We explore the imprints, a…

The motivation for studying the rolling tachyon and non-commutative inflation comes from string theory. In the tachyon inflation scenario, metric perturbations are created by tachyon field fluctuations during inflation. We drive the exact…

Chiral cosmic strings naturally arise in many particle physics models, in particular in supersymmetric theories with a D-term. These strings have a single fermion zero mode in the core. We derive the general equation of motion for such…

Brane inflation in superstring theory ends when branes collide, initiating the hot big bang. Cosmic superstrings are produced during the brane collision. The cosmic superstrings produced in a D3-brane-antibrane inflationary scenario have a…

Previously developed analytic models for the evolution of cosmic string and monopole networks are applied to networks of monopoles attached to two or more strings; the former case is usually known as cosmic necklaces. These networks are a…

We point out that the temperature fluctuations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) can be generated in a way that is different from the one usually assumed in slow-roll inflation. Our mechanism is based on vacuum fluctuations of fields…

We describe a scenario for inflation in the framework of non-critical string theory, which does not employ an inflaton field. There is an exponential expansion of the volume of the Universe, induced by enormous entropy production in the…

In spite of its great phenomenological success, current models of scalar field-driven inflation suffer from important unresolved conceptual issues. New fundamental physics will be required to address these questions. String theory is a…