Related papers: Runaway dilaton models: improved constraints from …
The evidence for the accelerated expansion of the universe and the time-dependence of the fine-structure constant suggests the existence of at least one scalar field with a mass of order H_0. If such a field exists, then it is generally…
We present a minimal model for the Universe evolution fully extracted from effective String Theory. This model is by its construction close to the standard cosmological evolution, and it is driven selfconsistently by the evolution of the…
The possibility that the expansion rate of the Universe, as reflected by the Red Shift, could be produced by the existence of the dilaton field is explored. The analysis starts from previously studied solutions of the Einstein equations for…
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…
Gravitation is described in the context of a dilatonic theory that is conformally related to general relativity. All dimensionless ratios of fundamental dimensional quantities, e.g. particle masses and the Planck mass, as well as the…
Unimodular gravity is an interesting approach to address the cosmological constant problem, since the vacuum energy density of quantum fields does not gravitate in this framework, and the cosmological constant appears as an integration…
A wide class of dilatation symmetric effective actions in higher dimensions leads to a vanishing four-dimensional cosmological constant. This requires no tuning of parameters and results from the absence of an allowed potential for the…
We recently proposed a chameleonic solution to the cosmological constant problem - Phys. Rev. D82 (2010) 044006. We further elaborate on our proposal discussing also some new results. The basic ingredients of the model are A) a chameleonic…
We review a few off-the-beaten-track ideas in cosmology. They solve a variety of fundamental problems; also they are fun. We start with a description of non-singular dilaton cosmology. In these scenarios gravity is modified so that the…
We find new solutions to the five-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton theory with cosmological constant where the dilaton field couples to the electromagnetic field as well as to the cosmological term with two different coupling constants.…
We introduce an $N=1$ supergravity model based on the gauged shift symmetry of a single chiral multiplet, which can be identified with the string dilaton or a compactification modulus. The model allows for a tunably small and positive value…
We address the important issue of stabilizing the dilaton in the context of superstring cosmology. Scalar potentials which arise out of gaugino condensates in string models are generally exponential in nature. In a cosmological setting this…
We study a string-inspired dilaton cosmology in the Damour--Polyakov (DP) regime using dynamical-systems methods, aiming to make explicit how cosmological relaxation controls deviations from the equivalence principle. Working in the…
We review various aspects of de Sitter spacetime in string theory: its status as an effective field theory spacetime solution, its relation to the vacuum energy problem in string theory, its (global) holographic definition in terms of two…
The generic scale-invariant theory of an axion and a dilaton coupled to gravity in $d$-dimensions is generalized to a `universal' one-axion model with two dilatons that reproduces itself under consistent dimensional-reduction/truncation.…
We consider the dilaton in the strong string coupling limit and elaborate on the original idea of Damour and Polyakov whereby the dilaton coupling to matter has a minimum with a vanishing value at finite field-value. Combining this type of…
String gas cosmology is rewritten in the Einstein frame. In an effective theory in which a gas of closed strings is coupled to a dilaton gravity background without any potential for the dilaton, the Hagedorn phase which is quasi-static in…
We use a combination of simulated cosmological probes and astrophysical tests of the stability of the fine-structure constant $\alpha$, as expected from the forthcoming European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), to constrain the class of…
Considering the linearized gravity with matter fields, the effective potential of the ``conformal dilaton'' in the string frame is generated semiclassically by one-loop contribution of heavy matter fields. This in turn generates a…
We compute the time variation of the fundamental constants (such as the ratio of the proton mass to the electron mass, the strong coupling constant, the fine structure constant and Newton's constant) within the context of the so-called…