Related papers: Swampland Conjectures and Late-Time Cosmology
The Swampland Distance Conjecture (SDC) constraints the dynamics emerging at infinite distances in field space of any effective field theory consistent with quantum gravity. It provides a relation between the cut-off in energies and the…
Independent tests aiming to constrain the value of the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ are usually difficult because of its extreme smallness $\left(\Lambda \simeq 1\times 10^{-52}~\textrm{m}^{-2},~\textrm{or}~2.89\times…
Single-field models of accelerated expansion with nearly flat potentials, despite being able to provide observationally viable explanations for the early-time cosmic inflation and the late-time cosmic acceleration, are in strong tension…
Starting from the swampland distance conjecture, and using the species bound for a large number of weakly-coupled particles, we give a derivation of the recently proposed trans-Planckian censorship conjecture. Our argument demonstrates how…
We investigate the late-time cosmological behaviour of scalar-tensor theories with a universal multiplicative coupling between the scalar field and the matter Lagrangian in the matter era. This class of theory encompasses the case of the…
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…
We show how the scalar field, a candidate of quintessence, in a proposed model of the scalar-tensor theories of gravity provides a way to understand a small but nonzero cosmological constant as indicated by recent observations. A particular…
We describe scalar-bimetric theories where the dynamics of the Universe are governed by two separate metrics, each with an Einstein-Hilbert term. In this setting, the baryonic and dark matter components of the Universe couple to metrics…
In these lecture notes we discuss recently conjectured instability of anti-de Sitter space, resulting in gravitational collapse of a large class of arbitrarily small initial perturbations. We uncover the technical details used in the…
We discuss some of the issues which we encounter when we try to invoke the scalar-tensor theories of gravitation as a theoretical basis of quintessence. One of the advantages of appealing to these theories is that they allow us to implement…
A hypothesis of curvature pressure is used to derive a static and stable cosmology with a tired-light redshift. The idea is that the high energy particles in the inter-galactic medium do not travel along geodesics because of the strong…
We discuss the Freund-Rubin compactification with cosmological constant and the dilaton field, and examine the stability of the spacetimes at the low energy. The Minkowski or de Sitter spacetime can be obtained if the dilation field is…
The accelerating universe is closely related to today's version of the cosmological constant problem; fine-tuning and coincidence problems. We show how successfully the scalar-tensor theory, a rather rigid theoretical idea, provides us with…
We argue that, in the presence of time-dependent fluxes and quantum corrections, four-dimensional de Sitter solutions should appear in the type IIB string landscape and not in the swampland. Our construction considers generic choices of…
The concept of deformation of Riemannian geometry is reviewed, with applications to gravitation and cosmology. Starting with an analysis of the cosmological constant problem, it is shown that space-times are deformable in the sense of local…
If we want to explain the recently discovered accelerated stage of the universe, one of the option we have is to modify the Einstein tensor. The simplest such modification, in agreement with all observations, is the positive cosmological…
There is an approximately 9% discrepancy, corresponding to 2.4sigma, between two independent constraints on the expansion rate of the universe: one indirectly arising from the cosmic microwave background and baryon acoustic oscillations,…
We consider a scalar field with a bottom-less potential, such as $g^3 \phi$, finding that cosmologies unavoidably end up with a crunch, late enough to be compatible with observations if $g \lesssim 1.2 H_0^{2/3} M_{\rm Pl}^{1/3}$. If…
Motivated by the early discovery of the gigantic landscape of string theory vacua, in recent years people switched direction to try to find constraints on low energy effective field theories from UV-complete descriptions for example quantum…
We are at an interesting juncture in cosmology. With new methods and technology, the accuracy in measurement of the Hubble constant has vastly improved, but a recent tension has arisen that is either signaling new physics or as-yet…