Related papers: Moduli and Graviton Production during Moduli Stabi…
We consider a braneworld scenario with a black brane parallel to our brane, aiming towards a Higgs phase of gravity in string theory. The existence of the black brane spontaneously breaks the Lorentz symmetry on our brane but preserves the…
This article represents the author's PhD thesis. It describes moduli stabilisation in IIB string theory and applications to phenomenological topics. The first half of the thesis starts with an introductory review. It continues with an…
Field redefinitions occur in string compactifications at the one loop level. We review arguments for why such redefinitions occur and study their effect on moduli stabilisation and supersymmetry breaking in the LARGE volume scenario. For…
In the context of the field theory limit of superstrings, we consider an almost realistic model of supersymmetry breaking by gaugino condensation which includes, through nonperturbative corrections to the K\"ahler potential, dilaton…
We study the gravitational wave phenomenology in models of solitosynthesis. In such models, a first order phase transition is precipitated by a period in which non-topological solitons with a conserved global charge (Q-balls) accumulate…
We consider the production of gravitinos and moduli fields from quantum vacuum fluctuations induced by the presence of scalar metric perturbations at the end of inflation. We obtain the corresponding occupation numbers, up to first order in…
Gravitational waves were copiously produced in the early Universe whenever the processes taking place were sufficiently violent. The spectra of several of these gravitational wave backgrounds on subhorizon scales have been extensively…
We study moduli dependent threshold corrections to gravitational couplings in the case of the heterotic string compactified on a symmetric orbifold, for untwisted moduli, extending previous analysis on gauge couplings. Like in the gauge…
Moduli stabilisation in superstring compactifications on Calabi-Yau orientifolds remains a key challenge in the search for realistic string vacua. In particular, odd moduli arising from the reduction of 2-forms $(B_2,C_2)$ in type IIB are…
We study the effects of particle production on the evolution of the inflaton field in an axion monodromy model with the goal of discovering in which situations the resulting dynamics will be consistent with the {\it swampland constraints}.…
In the modulated reheating scenario, the field that drives inflation has a spatially varying decay rate, and the resulting inhomogeneous reheating process generates adiabatic perturbations. We examine the statistical properties of the…
We study soliton solutions in scalar field theory with a variety of unbounded potentials. A subset of these potentials have Gaussian lump solutions and their fluctuation spectrum is governed by the harmonic oscillator problem. These lumps…
In braneworld scenarios with compact extra dimensions, the modulus field typically remains undetermined without an appropriate stabilization mechanism. A common approach introduces a bulk scalar field that generates an effective potential…
We study KKLT type models with moduli-mixing superpotential. In several string models, gauge kinetic functions are written as linear combinations of two or more moduli fields. Their gluino condensation generates moduli-mixing…
Taking into account the recently proposed poly-instanton corrections to the superpotential and combining the race-track with a KKLT respectively LARGE Volume Scenario in an intricate manner, we show that we gain exponential control over the…
We investigate the conditions for a QCD axion to coexist with stabilised moduli in string compactifications. We show how the simplest approaches to moduli stabilisation give unacceptably large masses to the axions. We observe that solving…
We study the sub-structure of the heterotic Kahler moduli space due to the presence of non-Abelian internal gauge fields from the perspective of the four-dimensional effective theory. Internal gauge fields can be supersymmetric in some…
We analyze the interplay between K\"ahler moduli stabilization and chaotic inflation in supergravity. While heavy moduli decouple from inflation in the supersymmetric limit, supersymmetry breaking generically introduces non-decoupling…
We investigate the gravitational production of a scalar field $\chi$ with a mass exceeding the Hubble scale during inflation $m_\chi \gtrsim H_I$, employing both analytical and numerical approaches. We demonstrate that the steepest descent…
We study models of modular inflation of the form expected to arise from low energy effective actions of superstring theories. We argue on general grounds that the most likely models of modular slow-roll inflation are small field models in…