Related papers: Dark Energy, Extra Dimensions, and the Swampland
Observations provide increasingly strong evidence that the universe is accelerating. This revolutionary advance in cosmological observations confronts theoretical cosmology with a tremendous challenge, which it has so far failed to meet.…
This article briefly summarizes and reviews the motivations for - and the present status of - the proposal that the small size of the observed Dark Energy density can be understood in terms of the dynamical relaxation of two large extra…
The subject of this thesis is cosmological implications of string compactifications understood in a broad sense. In the first half of the thesis, we will begin by reviewing the four-dimensional description of the tree-level perturbative…
String theories suggest the existence of a plethora of axion-like fields with masses spread over a huge number of decades. Here we show that these ideas lend themselves to a model of quintessence with no super-Planckian field excursions and…
Compactified string theories give rise to discrete symmetries which are essential if they are to provide a realistic low energy theory. We find that in a class of four dimensional string theories these symmetries are constrained by similar…
Dark energy is an elusive concept, which has been introduced two decades ago in order to make the acceleration of the universe a comprehensible phenomenon. However, the nature of this energy is far from being understood, both from a…
To explain the acceleration of the cosmological expansion researchers have considered an unusual form of mass-energy generically called dark energy. Dark energy has a ratio of pressure over mass density which obeys $w=p/\rho <-1/3$. This…
I review the issue of string and compactification scales in the weak-coupling regimes of string theory. I explain how in the Brane World scenario a (effectively) two-dimensional transverse space that is hierarchically larger than the string…
The 19th century Aether died with Special Relativity but was resurrected by General Relativity in the form of dark energy; a tensile material with tension equal to its energy density. Such a material is provided by the D-branes of…
Taking up four model universes we study the behaviour and contribution of dark energy to the accelerated expansion of the universe, in the modified scale covariant theory of gravitation. Here, it is seen that though this modified theory may…
In gravitational theories with extra dimensions, it is argued that the existence of a positive vacuum energy generically implies catastrophic instability of our four-dimensional world. The most generic instability is a decompactification…
The high-quality cosmological data, which became available in the last decade, have thrusted upon us a rather preposterous composition for the universe which poses one of the greatest challenges theoretical physics has ever faced: the…
The acceleration of the cosmic expansion is a fundamental challenge to standard models of particle physics and cosmology. The new physics of dark energy may lie in the nature of gravity, the quantum vacuum, or extra dimensions. I give a…
We study constraints imposed by two proposed string Swampland criteria on cosmology. These criteria involve an upper bound on the range traversed by scalar fields as well as a lower bound on $|\nabla_{\phi} V|/V$ when $V >0$. We find that…
The first part of this article summarizes the evidence for Dark Energy and Dark Matter, as well as the naturalness issues which plague current theories of Dark Energy. The main point of this part is to argue why these naturalness issues…
In recent years it has been realized that in string/$M$ theories compactified to four dimensions which satisfy cosmological constraints, it is possible to make some generic predictions for particle physics and dark matter: a non-thermal…
It has recently been proposed that the Universe might be accelerating as a consequence of extra dimensions with time varying size. We show that although these scenarios can lead to acceleration, they run into serious difficulty when taking…
Our current best guess for a unified theory of gravitation and quantum field theory (string theory) generically predicts a set of requirements for a consistently quantized theory, the Swampland criteria. Refined versions of these criteria…
The configuration resulting after a collision of gravitational sources in a higher dimensional space with extra dimensions is investigated. Evidence is found that as the energy increases, there is a phase transition in the topology of the…
Astrophysical observations are pointing out huge amounts of dark matter and dark energy needed to explain the observed large scale structures and cosmic accelerating expansion. Up to now, no experimental evidence has been found, at…