Related papers: String Fragmentation in Supercooled Confinement an…
Strongly first-order phase transitions, i.e., those with a large order parameter, are characterized by a considerable supercooling and high velocities of phase transition fronts. A very strong phase transition may have important…
It has recently been argued that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua. This would imply that the current accelerated expansion of the universe is not driven by a cosmological constant (or vacuum energy) but by other means such as a…
In this talk I will discuss the role of finite temperature quantum corrections in string cosmology and show that they can lead to a stabilization mechanism for the volume moduli. I will show that from the higher dimensional perspective this…
We give examples of string compactifications to 4d Minkowski space with different amounts of supersymmetry that can be connected by spherical domain walls. The tension of these domain walls is tunably lower than the 4d Planck scale. The…
We argue that black holes microstates leave an imprint on the gravitational vacuum through their virtual fluctuations. This imprint yields a power law fall off -- rather than an exponential fall off -- for the entanglement of planck scale…
Space-filling S-branes can mediate a transition between a contracting and an expanding universe in the Einstein frame. Following up on previous work that uncovered such bouncing solutions in the context of weakly coupled thermal…
We study cosmic strings in the complex symmetron model, a scalar-tensor theory with a spontaneously broken local $U(1)$ symmetry in low matter density regions. Using numerical simulations, we show that these strings preferentially attach to…
We investigate entanglement dynamics for two atoms coupling with fluctuating electromagnetic field in the cosmic string spacetime. We calculate the entanglement for different conditions. It is found that the entanglement behaviors are…
The topic of cosmic strings provides a bridge between the physics of the very small and the very large. They are predicted by some unified theories of particle interactions. If they exist, they may help to explain some of the largest-scale…
We show that metastable cosmic strings break at early times, either via finite-temperature effects or by attaching to pre-existing monopoles during network percolation. The resulting segments can be initially super-horizon in size and thus…
In this conference proceeding, I discuss in detail the deconfinement to quark matter that takes place at large densities and/or temperatures. The first-order phase transition that is assumed to appear beyond a critical point gives rise to…
If dark matter couples directly to a light force mediator, then it may form bound states in the early universe and in the non-relativistic environment of haloes today. In this work, we establish a field-theoretic framework for the…
We extend previous studies of big bang nucleosynthesis, with the assumption that ordinary matter and dark matter sectors are entangled through the number of degrees of freedom entering the Friedmann equations. This conjecture allows us to…
It has been suggested that cosmological dark matter may include a population of vortons (meaning small centrifugally stabilised cosmic string loops) as an outcome of (non-standard) electroweak symmetry breaking. The implications for this…
The implications of string theory for understanding the dimension of decompactified spacetime are discussed. Results from a computer model designed to simulate expansion of the early universe during the string dominated phase are presented.…
Confinement describes the phenomenon when the attraction between two particles grows with their distance, most prominently found in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) between quarks. In condensed matter physics, confinement can appear in quantum…
The strong coupling limit of a quantum system is in general quite complicated, but in some cases a great simplification occurs: the strongly coupled limit is equivalent to the weakly coupled limit of some other system. In string theory…
We describe the results of high-resolution numerical simulations of string-induced structure formation in open universes and those with a non-zero cosmological constant. For models with $\Gamma = \Omega h = 0.1 - 0.2$ and a cold dark matter…
There is currently great interest in the strong coupling between the quantized photon field of a cavity and electronic or other degrees of freedom in materials. A major goal is the creation of novel collective states entangling photons with…
We review applications of string theory to cosmology, from primordial times to the present-day accelerated expansion. Starting with a brief overview of cosmology and string compactifications, we discuss in detail moduli stabilisation,…