Related papers: Runaway dilaton models: improved constraints from …
The incorporation of a small cosmological constant within radiatively-broken scale-invariant models is discussed. We show that phenomenologically consistent scale-invariant models can be constructed which allow a small positive cosmological…
The laws of physics have a set of fundamental constants, and it is generally admitted that only dimensionless combinations of constants have physical significance. These combinations include the electromagnetic and gravitational fine…
We are at a specific period of modern cosmology, during which the large increase of the amount of data leads to the idea that the determination of cosmological parameters has been achieved with a rather good precision. There is a large…
The confrontation between Einstein's gravitation theory and experimental results, notably binary pulsar data, is summarized and its significance discussed. Experiment and theory agree at the 10^{-3} level. All the basic structures of…
We examine the field equations of a self-gravitating texture in low-energy superstring gravity, allowing for an arbitrary coupling of the texture field to the dilaton. Both massive and massless dilatons are considered. For the massless…
Faced by recent evidence for a flat universe dominated by dark energy, cosmologists grapple with deep cosmic enigmas such as the cosmological constant problem, extreme fine-tuning and the cosmic coincidence problem. The extent to which we…
We examine the field equations of a self-gravitating global string in low energy superstring gravity, allowing for an arbitrary coupling of the global string to the dilaton. Massive and massless dilatons are considered. For the massive…
We consider a non singular origin for the Universe starting from an Einstein static Universe, the so called "emergent universe" scenario, in the framework of a theory which uses two volume elements $\sqrt{-{g}}d^{4}x$ and $\Phi d^{4}x$,…
We demonstrate that there exists a large class of action functionals of the scalar curvature and of the Gauss-Bonnet invariant which are able to relax dynamically a large cosmological constant (CC), whatever it be its starting value in the…
Supersymmetric Peccei-Quinn symmetry and string theory predict a complex scalar field comprising a dilaton and an axion. These fields are massless at high energies, but it is known since long that the axion is stabilized in an instanton…
The weakly-coupled heterotic string is known to have problems of dilaton/moduli stabilization, supersymmetry breaking (by hidden-sector gaugino condensation), gauge coupling unification (or the Newton's constant), QCD axion, as well as…
String effective theories contain a dilaton scalar field which couples to gravity, matter and radiation. In general, particle masses will have different dilaton couplings. We can always choose a conformal frame in which baryons have…
We develop an exact functional method applied to the bosonic string on a shperical world sheet, in graviton and dilaton backgrounds, consistent with conformal invariance. In this method, quantum fluctuations are controled by the amplitude…
We study the possibility of canceling the cosmological constant in supergravity string models. We show that with a suitable choice of superpotential the vacuum energy may vanish with the dilaton field at its minimum and supersymmetry broken…
Rolling tachyon field models are among the candidates suggested as explanations for the recent acceleration of the Universe. In these models the field is expected to interact with gauge fields and lead to variations of the fine-structure…
Cosmological implication of rolling tachyons is reported in the context of effective field theory. With a brief review of rolling tachyons in both flat and curved spacetimes, we study the string cosmological model with both tachyon and…
We derive the character of neutrino oscillations that results from a model of equivalence principle violation suggested recently by Damour and Polyakov as a plausible consequence of string theory. In this model neutrino oscillations will…
We present a novel theory of the very early universe which addresses the traditional horizon and flatness problems of big bang cosmology and predicts a scale invariant spectrum of perturbations. Unlike inflation, this scenario requires no…
The requirement that the laws of physics must be invariant under point-dependent transformations of the units of length, time, and mass is used as a selection principle while studying different generic effective theories of gravity. Thereof…
We discuss some of the issues which we encounter when we try to invoke the scalar-tensor theories of gravitation as a theoretical basis of quintessence. One of the advantages of appealing to these theories is that they allow us to implement…