Related papers: Cosmology and Supergravity
The standard inflationary version of the origin of the cosmic structure as the result of the quantum fluctuations during the inflationary stage is less than fully satisfactory: how exactly does the Universe transit from a homogeneous and…
This talk, which was presented at Stephen Hawking's 60th birthday conference, begins with a discussion of the early development of the theory of inflationary density perturbations. Stephen played a crucial role in this work, at every level.…
We discuss homogeneous and isotropic cosmological models driven by SU(2) gauge fields in the framework of Einstein gravity. There exists a Yang-Mills field configuration, parametrized by a single scalar function, which consists of parallel…
Cosmic inflation is arguably the most favoured paradigm of the very early Universe. It postulates an early phase of fast, nearly exponential, and accelerated expansion. Inflationary models are capable of explaining the overall flatness and…
We discuss N=1 supergravity inflationary models based on two chiral multiplets, the inflaton and the goldstino superfield. Using superconformal methods for these models, we propose to replace the unconstrained chiral goldstino multiplet by…
Cosmological models often contain scalar fields, which can acquire global nonzero expectation values that change with the comoving time. Among the possible consequences of these scalar-field backgrounds, an accelerated cosmological…
Supersymmetry breaking in the early universe induces scalar soft potentials with curvature of order the Hubble constant. This has a dramatic effect on the coherent production of scalar fields along flat directions. For the moduli problem it…
There is strong evidence from cosmological data that the universe underwent an epoch of superluminal expansion called inflation. A satisfactory embedding of inflation in fundamental physics has been an outstanding problem at the interface…
We examine an extension of the ideas of quantum cosmology and, in particular, the proposal of Hartle and Hawking for the boundary conditions of the Universe, to models which incorporate Yang-Mills fields. Inhomogeneous perturbations about a…
Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role allowing precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model. The expectation of the paradigm of inflation and…
We use a new mechanism for generating a Fayet-Iliopoulos term in supergravity, which is not associated to an R symmetry, to construct a semi-realistic theory of slow-roll inflation for a theory with the same K\"ahler potential and…
Using the dS/QFT correspondence in the context of inflation allows for the study of interesting, otherwise inaccessible physics. In particular, by studying inflation via its dual field theory at the boundary of the de Sitter space, it may…
We propose a geometric explanation of the standard model of Glashow, Weinberg and Salam for the known elementary particles. Our model is a generic Quantum Field Theory in dimension four, obtained by developing along a Lorentz sub-manifold…
We consider a minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model, with right-handed neutrinos and local B-L, the difference between baryon and lepton number, a symmetry which is spontaneously broken at the scale of grand unification. To…
Abdus Salam was known for his `grand views', grand views of science as well as grand views of society. In this talk the grand view of theoretical physics is put in perspective.
We consider a physically viable cosmological model that has a field dependent Gauss-Bonnet coupling in its effective action, in addition to a standard scalar field potential. The presence of such terms in the four dimensional effective…
We explore the cosmological content of Salam-Sezgin six dimensional supergravity, and find a solution to the field equations in qualitative agreement with observation of distant supernovae, primordial nucleosynthesis abundances, and recent…
A new class of gravity-matter models defined in terms of two independent non-Riemannian volume forms (alternative generally covariant integration measure densities) on the space-time manifold are studied in some detail. These models involve…
The interplay between string theory and early-universe cosmology offers promising avenues to explore high-energy regimes where the standard single-field slow-roll model may no longer provide an accurate description. One intriguing scenario…
Based on an earlier introduced new class of generalized gravity-matter models defined in terms of two independent non-Riemannian volume forms (alternative generally covariant integration measure densities) on the space-time manifold, we…