Related papers: Landscape, Swampland, and Extra Dimensions
The aim of this note is to address the low energy limit of quantum field theories with a minimal length scale. The essential feature of these models is that the minimal length acts as a regulator in the asymptotic high energy limit which is…
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…
This review on dark energy is intended for a wider audience, beginners as well as experts. It contains important notes on various aspects of dark energy and its alternatives. The section on Newtonian cosmology followed by heuristic…
We consider a model for an underpinning of the universe: there are oscillators at the Planck scale in the background dark energy. Starting from a coherent array of such oscillators it is possible to get a description from elementary…
In the standard model of cosmology, dark matter and dark energy are presently the two main contributors to the total energy in the Universe. However, these two dark components are still of unknown nature, and many alternative explanations…
I briefly summarize a recent research program aiming to probe the landscape of low-energy phases of string theory from a global perspective. Borrowing conceptual lessons from the swampland program, I will discuss how the effective theories…
In this paper we explore possible extensions of Interacting Dark Energy cosmologies, where Dark Energy and Dark Matter interact non-gravitationally with one another. In particular, we focus on the neutrino sector, analyzing the effect of…
We propose that the effective dimensionality of the space we live in depends on the length scale we are probing. As the length scale increases, new dimensions open up. At short scales the space is lower dimensional; at the intermediate…
In the present work we discuss inflation, dark matter and cosmological evolution in the context of the brane-world scenario. Being string theory inspired, the brane-world models provide corrections to the General Relativity, which is…
It has been proposed that the accelerated expansion of the universe can be explained by the merging of our universe with baby universes, resulting in dark energy with a phantom-like equation of state. However, the evidence in favor of it…
The accelerated expansion of the Universe is one of the main discoveries of the past decades, indicating the presence of an unknown component: the dark energy. Evidence of its presence is being gathered by a succession of observational…
We study a cosmological model in which phantom dark energy is coupled to dark matter by phenomenologically introducing a coupled term to the equations of motion of dark energy and dark matter. This term is parameterized by a dimensionless…
We investigate a string-inspired dark energy scenario featuring a scalar field with a coupling to the Gauss-Bonnet invariant. Such coupling can trigger the onset of late dark energy domination after a scaling matter era. The universe may…
In this mini-review we discuss first why we should investigate cosmological models beyond LCDM. We then show how to describe dark energy or modified gravity models in a fluid language with the help of one background and two perturbation…
The accelerating expansion of the Universe points to a small positive value for the cosmological constant or vacuum energy density. We discuss recent ideas that the cosmological constant plus LHC results might hint at critical phenomena…
At momenta much higher than the Hubble scale, the cosmological expansion can be thought of as a weak gravitational field. We consider QFT in a particularly convenient set of coordinates that makes this manifest, so that, for those high…
We propose a framework for the low-energy realization of supersymmetry which is very predictive, but differs radically in its phenomenological implications from the supersymmetric Standard Model (minimal or otherwise). The proposal consists…
Observations show that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. This requires that the dominant constituent of matter in the Universe has some unusual properties like negative pressure. This exotic component has been given the name…
We discuss how entropy bounds, which are not respected in the standard cosmology, constrain the parameters of a previously suggested cosmology with a finite total mass. In that alternative cosmology the matter density was postulated to be a…
The possibility that the energy density of the Universe is dominated by a network of low-tension domain walls provides an alternative to the commonly discussed cosmological constant and scalar-field quintessence models of dark energy. We…