Related papers: Do we Come from a Quantum Anomaly?
We show that adiabatic, super-Hubble, and almost scale invariant density fluctuations are produced by cosmic strings in a contracting universe. An essential point is that isocurvature perturbations produced by topological defects such as…
Cosmic acceleration is widely believed to require either a source of negative pressure (i.e., dark energy), or a modification of gravity, which necessarily implies new degrees of freedom beyond those of Einstein gravity. In this paper we…
I review a cosmological model based on string-inspired gravity with anomalies and torsion, which leads to a cosmology of running-vacuum-model (RVM) type. It is argued that such a model can lead to observable, in principle, deviations from…
We develop a string-inspired model for particle cosmology, based on a flipped SU(5)$\times$U(1) gauge group formulated in a no-scale supergravity framework. The model realizes Starobinsky-like inflation, which we assume to be followed by…
Particle production in strong electromagnetic fields is a recurring theme in solid state physics, heavy ion collisions, early universe cosmology and formal quantum field theory. In this paper we discuss the Dirac equation in a background of…
We calculate the time evolution of the expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor for a minimally-coupled massless scalar field in cosmological spacetimes, with an application to dark energy in mind. We first study the evolution from…
The gravitational Chern-Simons term coupled to an evolving axion is known to generate lepton number through the gravitational anomaly. We examine this leptogenesis scenario in the presence of the Gauss-Bonnet term over and above the…
We propose a novel gravitational mechanism for the non-thermal production of dark matter driven by curvature-induced tachyonic instabilities after inflation. Departing from the commonly studied non-minimal couplings to gravity, our…
The incorporation of bulk viscosity process to General Relativity leads to the appearance of nonsingular backgrounds that, at early and late times, depict an accelerated universe. These backgrounds could be analytically calculated and…
We study physics concerning the cosmological constant problem in the framework of effective field theory and suggest that a dominant part of dark energy can originate from gravitational corrections of vacuum energy, under the assumption…
We consider the single-parameter $\mathcal{R}+ c\mathcal{R}^2$ gravitational action and use constraints from astrophysics and the laboratory to derive a natural relation between the coefficient $c$ and the value of the cosmological…
We construct gravitational modifications that go beyond Horndeski, namely theories with extended nonminimal derivative couplings, in which the coefficient functions depend not only on the scalar field but also on its kinetic energy. Such…
We compute the gravitational leptogenesis generated from the parity-violating gravitational waves sourced by an abelian gauge field coupled to a pseudo-scalar inflation. We show that, once the CMB bound on the tensor-to-scalar ratio is…
The discovery ten years ago that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating put in place the last major building block of the present cosmological model, in which the Universe is composed of 4% baryons, 20% dark matter, and 76% dark…
We propose heavy axions as a natural superheavy dark matter candidate in string theory, with the relic density of dark matter originating in quantum fluctuations during cosmic inflation. String Theory is well known for the possibility of…
In addition to spectacular signatures such as black hole superradiance and the rotation of CMB polarization, the plenitude of axions appearing in the string axiverse may have potentially dangerous implications. An example is the…
We discuss a novel mechanism for generating dark matter from a fast-rolling scalar field, relevant for both inflation and rotating axion models, and apply it specifically to the (QCD) axion. Dark matter comes from scalar field fluctuations…
We study cosmological solutions of (pseudo)scalar theories with periodic potentials, in the presence of arbitrary cosmological fluids -- including a cosmological constant of either sign. Independently of the initial misalignment angle and…
Our Universe has multiple examples of unexplained gravitational losses in black holes and neutron stars. As all of the space is squeezed out, nucleons are not easily compressible further. Gravitational loss will allow galactic black holes…
In previous works we have embedded the Running Vacuum Model (RVM) of Cosmology in the framework of string theory. Specifically, we considered a string-inspired Cosmology with primordial gravitational waves (GW) and gravitational anomalies,…