Related papers: Aether, Dark Energy, and String Compactifications
Perhaps the greatest challenge for fundamental theories based on compactification from extra dimensions is accommodating a period of accelerated cosmological expansion. Previous studies have identified constraints imposed by the existence…
We motivate a relation between dark energy and the scale of new physics in weakly coupled string theory. This mixing between infrared and ultraviolet physics leads to a unique corner for real-world phenomenology: barring fine-tunings, we…
Recent observations provide strong evidence that the universe is accelerating. This confronts theory with a severe challenge. Explanations of the acceleration within the framework of general relativity are plagued by difficulties. General…
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…
We argue that, for generic string compactifications, dark energy is likely to signal the beginning of the end of our universe, perhaps even through decompactification, with possible implications for the cosmological coincidence problem.…
We present a string theory construction in which the particle physics contributions to the one-loop vacuum energy exactly cancel, whilst the gravitational contributions are suppressed in the size of one or two large extra dimensions. This…
Adopting Dirac's brane variation prescription, the energy-momentum tensor of a brane gets supplemented by a geometrical (embedding originated) dark component. While the masslessness of the graviton is preserved, and the Newton force law is…
We study the stability of extra dimensions in string gas cosmology at late times. Vacuum energy and, interestingly, baryons lead to decompactification after they become dynamically important. The string gas can stabilise the effect of…
Recently it was observed that the hyperbolic compactification of M/string theory related to S-branes may lead to a transient period of acceleration of the universe. We study time evolution of the corresponding effective 4d cosmological…
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…
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…
We study the evolution of relic D3-branes after the D3/\bd-brane inflation in string warped compactification. The motion of D3-branes can be frozen under certain condition during the radiation/matter domination. These D3-branes can not be…
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.…
We study the boundary state associated with the decay of an unstable D-brane with uniform electric field, 1>e>0 in the string units. Compactifying the D-brane along the direction of the electric field, we find that the decay process is…
1. Preliminaries. 2. Heterotic string and motivations for large volume compactifications; 2.1 Gauge coupling unification; 2.2 Supersymmetry breaking by compactification. 3. M-theory on S^1/Z_2 \times Calabi-Yau. 4. Type I/I' string theory…
Dark energy, the main constituent in our expanding universe, responsible for its acceleration, is currently being observed with unprecedented precision through various experiments. While several cosmological models can fit this latest data,…
We explore the cosmological dynamics of a minimalistic yet generic string-inspired model for multifield dark energy. Adopting a supergravity four-dimensional viewpoint, we motivate the model's structure arising from superstring…
Early Dark Energy (EDE) is a prominent model to resolve the Hubble tension, which employs a dynamical axion with a periodic potential. In this work, we take first steps towards the embedding of this model into stable compactifications of…
A long-standing problem of theoretical physics is the exceptionally small value of the cosmological constant $\Lambda \sim 10^{-120}$ measured in natural Planckian units. Here we derive this tiny number from a toroidal string cosmology…
Cosmic strings, a hot subject in the 1980's and early 1990's, lost its appeal when it was found that it leads to inconsistencies in the power spectrum of the measured cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies. However,…