Related papers: TASI lectures on cosmological observables and stri…
We study the string theory dynamics of the volume scalar rolling down an exponential potential during the period between inflation and reheating, in a background of cosmic superstring loops. In the context of the LVS potential, we…
Superstring theories are very promising theoretically, but the enormous landscape of string vacua and the (likely) very large underlying string scale imply that they may never be tested directly. Nevertheless, concrete constructions…
These four lectures cover four topics in modern cosmology: the cosmological constant, the cosmic microwave background, inflation, and cosmology as a probe of physics at the Planck scale. The underlying theme is that cosmology gives us a…
String theory avoids the ultraviolet infinities that arise in trying to quantize gravity. It is also more predictive than conventional quantum field theory, one aspect of this being the way that it contributed to the emergence of the…
The cosmic string is a useful probe of the early Universe and may give us a clue to physics at high energy scales where any artificial particle accelerators cannot reach. Although one of the most promising tools is the cosmic microwave…
We present a quantum quadratic gravity inflationary scenario that can accommodate the new cosmological constraints, which have disfavored Starobinsky inflation. The theory is asymptotically free in the ultraviolet, but 1-loop running is…
We review the recent developments in obtaining accelerating cosmologies and/or inflation from higher-dimensional gravitational theories, in particular superstring theories in ten dimensions and M-theory in eleven dimensions. We first…
We comment on the relation between string theory and empirical science, grounding our discussion in cosmology, a subject with increasingly precise data in which this connection operates at several levels. It is important to take into…
Cosmological solutions of the beta function equations for the background fields of the closed bosonic string are investigated at the one-loop level. Following recent work of Kostelecky and Perry, it is assumed that the spatial sections of…
After 25 years of its existence, inflationary theory gradually becomes the standard cosmological paradigm. However, we still do not know which of the many versions of inflationary cosmology will be favored by the future observational data.…
Inflationary string cosmology backgrounds can amplify perturbations in a more efficient way than conventional inflationary backgrounds, because the perturbation amplitude may grow - instead of being constant - outside the horizon. If not…
Cosmic strings provide a radically different paradigm for the formation of structure to the prevailing inflationary one. They afford some extra technical complications: for example, the calculation of the power spectrum of matter and…
We present an overview of inflationary models derived from string theory focusing mostly on closed string moduli as inflatons. After a detailed discussion of the eta-problem and different approaches to address it, we describe possible ways…
Making use of the wealth of new observational data coming from the sky it is possible to constrain particle physics theories beyond the Standard Model. One way to do this is illustrated in this article: a subset of theories admits cosmic…
Fibre inflation is a specific string theory construction based on the Large Volume Scenario that produces an inflationary plateau. We outline its relation to $\alpha$-attractor models for inflation, with the cosmological sector originating…
Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…
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…
Inflation may have been driven by a component which violated the Null-Energy Condition, thereby leading to {\it super inflation}. We provide the formalism to study cosmological perturbations when such a component is described by a scalar…
These lectures aim to provide a global picture of the spaces of consistent quantum supergravity theories and string vacua in higher dimensions. The lectures focus on theories in the even dimensions 10, 8, and 6. Supersymmetry, along with…
Focus of these lectures is the challenge of explaining the origin of structure in the Universe. The interplay between quantum field theory and classical general relativity has given rise to several interesting cosmological models which…