Related papers: Pre - Inflationary Clues from String Theory ?
The supergravity (SUGRA) theories with exact global $U(1)$ symmetry or shift symmetry in K\"ahler potential provide the natural frameworks for inflation. However, the quadratic inflation is disfavoured by the new results on primordial…
We consider DBI inflation with a quadratic potential and the effect of trapped branes on the inflationary fluctuations. When going through a trapped brane the effective potential of the inflaton receives a contribution whose effect is to…
We consider the low energy description of five dimensional models of supergravity with boundaries comprising a vector multiplet and the universal hypermultiplet in the bulk. We analyse the spontaneous breaking of supersymmetry induced by…
Models of supersymmetric D-term inflation require a new mass scale near 10^{15-16} GeV in order to match the density perturbation spectrum observed by COBE. Attempts to obtain such a scale from the anomalous U(1) of string theories fail in…
The first part of this review tries to provide a self-contained view of supersymmetry breaking from the bottom-up perspective. We thus describe N=1 supersymmetry in four dimensions, the Standard Model and the MSSM, with emphasis on the…
We compare the simplest realistic brane inflationary model to recent cosmological data, including WMAP 3-year cosmic microwave background (CMB) results, Sloan Digital Sky Survey luminous red galaxies (SDSS LRG) power spectrum data and…
We study pairs of planar D-branes intersecting on null hypersurfaces, and other related configurations. These are supersymmetric and have finite energy density. They provide open-string analogues of the parabolic orbifold and null-fluxbrane…
In cascade inflation and some other string inflation models, collisions of mobile branes with other branes or orbifold planes occur and lead to interesting cosmological signatures. The fundamental M/string-theory description of these…
The angular power spectrum is investigated in the model of supergravity, incorporating the target-space duality and the non-perturbative gaugino condensation in the hidden sector. The inflation and supersymmetry breaking occur at once by…
The first part of this thesis is a general introduction to the bosonic and fermionic string theory, to the concept of D brane and to string dualities. A discussion of anomalies cancellation closes the chapter. The second part of the thesis…
We consider the low energy phenomenology of superstrings. In particular we analyse supersymmetry breaking via gaugino condensate and we compare the phenomenology of the two different approaches to stabilize the dilaton field. We study the…
Inflationary cosmology is developed in the second Randall-Sundrum braneworld scenario, where the accelerated expansion arises through potentials that are too steep to drive inflation in conventional cosmology. A relationship between the…
As a first step towards inflation in genuinely F-theoretic setups, we propose a scenario where the inflaton is the relative position of two 7-branes on holomorphic 4-cycles. Non-supersymmetric gauge flux induces an attractive inter-brane…
We construct supersymmetric unified models which automatically lead to a period of inflation. The models all involve a U(1) symmetry which does not belong to the MSSM. We consider three different types of models depending on whether this…
We consider a supersymmetric hybrid inflation scenario in which the U(1) $R$-symmetry is explicitly broken by Planck scale suppressed operators in the superpotential. We provide an example with minimal K\"ahler potential, with the…
Cosmologists have embraced a particular ad hoc formula for the primordial power spectrum from inflation for universes with $\Omega_0 < 1$. However, the so-called ``Open Inflation'' models, which are attracting renewed interest in the…
A quantum-mechanical technique is used within the framework of U(2) super-Yang-Mills theory to investigate processes after recombination of two D-p-branes at one angle. Two types of initial conditions are considered, one of which with $p=4$…
We consider the 3+1 visible sector to live on a Hanany-Witten D-brane construction in type IIA string theory. The messenger sector consists of stretched strings from the visible brane to a hidden D6-brane in the extra spatial dimensions. In…
Seiberg and Witten have shown that the non-perturbative stability of string physics on conformally compactified spacetimes is related to the behaviour of the areas and volumes of certain branes as the brane is moved towards infinity. If, as…
Dvali and Shifman have proposed a field-theoretic mechanism for localizing gauge fields to "branes" in higher dimensional spaces using confinement in a bulk gauge theory. The resulting objects have a number of qualitative features in common…