Related papers: Contracting Cosmologies and the Swampland
In this note, we prove analytic bounds on the equation of state of a cosmological fluid composed of an arbitrary number of canonical scalars evolving in a negative multi-exponential potential. Because of the negative energy, the universe is…
The Swampland program, which looks for low energy theories consistent with quantum gravity, has led to the introduction of a dark dimension stemming from the cosmological constant. We show that the same argument leads to the emergence of…
We study the dynamical evolution of FLRW cosmologies in the presence of a tower of scalar light states and a runaway exponential potential. Some of the attractor solutions have problematic behaviours from the EFT point of view, which we use…
We present a phase-plane analysis of cosmologies containing a scalar field $\phi$ with an exponential potential $V \propto \exp(-\lambda \kappa \phi)$ where $\kappa^2 = 8\pi G$ and $V$ may be positive or negative. We show that power-law…
We study the cosmological evolution of scalar fields that arise from a phase transition at some energy scale $\Lm_c$. We focus on negative power potentials given by $V=c\Lm_c^{4+n}\phi^{-n}$ and restrict the cosmological viable values of…
We argue that the total observable entropy is bounded by the inverse of the cosmological constant. This holds for all space-times with a positive cosmological constant, including cosmologies dominated by ordinary matter, and recollapsing…
We discuss the cosmological implications of the string swampland conjectures for late-time cosmology, and test them against a wide range of state of the art cosmological observations. The refined de Sitter conjecture constrains either the…
New Ekpyrotic Cosmology is an alternative scenario of early universe cosmology in which the universe existed before the big bang. The simplest model relies on two scalar fields, whose entropy perturbation leads to a scale-invariant spectrum…
We show that constraints on scalar field potentials and towers of light massive states in asymptotic limits of scalar field space (as posited by the de Sitter Conjecture and the Swampland Distance Conjecture, respectively) are correlated…
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…
It is generally accepted that the entropy of an asymptotically de Sitter universe is bounded by the area, in Planck units, of the de Sitter horizon. Based on an analysis of the entropy associated to the vacuum quantum fluctuations, we…
We propose a mechanism borrowed from string theory which yields a non-singular transition from a phase of Ekpyrotic contraction to the expanding phase of Standard Big Bang cosmology. The same mechanism converts the initial vacuum spectrum…
A detailed study of quantum and semiclassical Euclidean wormholes for Einstein's theory with a minimally coupled scalar field has been performed for a class of potentials. Massless, constant, massive (quadratic in the scalar field) and…
It is suggested that dark energy in a brane world can help reconcile an infinitely cyclic cosmology with the second law of thermodynamics. A cyclic cosmology is described, in which dark energy with constant equation of state leads to a…
We discuss the naturalness of exponential potentials for quintessence, showing that the resulting almost flat direction in the space of scalar fields, as well as the small time dependent cosmon mass, can be related to an anomalous…
It has been recently proposed that the interpretation of gravity as an emergent, entropic force might have nontrivial implications to cosmology. Here two approaches are investigated: in one, the Friedman equation receives entropic…
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…
We derive constraints on scalar field theories coupled to gravity by using recently developed positivity bounds in the presence of gravity. It is found that a canonically-normalized real scalar cannot have an arbitrarily flat potential…
We address the issue why a cosmological constant (dark energy) possesses a small positive value instead of being zero. Motivated by the cosmic landscape picture, we mimic the dark energy by a scalar field with potential wells and show that…
Recently, the observed equation of state for dark energy appears to favor values below $-1$. The tendency implies that the nature of dark energy may be quite different from that of the cosmological constant. In view of the adjustment on the…