Related papers: String Cosmology: A Review
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,…
Duality symmetries in M--theory and string theory are reviewed, with particular emphasis on the way in which string winding modes and brane wrapping modes can lead to new spatial dimensions. Brane world-volumes wrapping around Lorentzian…
At its very beginning, the universe is believed to have grown exponentially in size via the mechanism of inflation. The almost scale-invariant density perturbation spectrum predicted by inflation is strongly supported by cosmological…
The Standard Model is the low-energy limit of a microscopic theory which includes extra dimensions and new symmetries. A part of my thesis consisted in constructing a new class of models with two extra dimensions. We showed that these…
During the last ten years, intriguing dualities between gauge and string theory have been found and explored. They provide a novel window on strongly coupled gauge physics, including QCD-like models. Based on a short historical review of…
We argue that cosmic strings with high winding numbers generally form in first-order gauge symmetry breaking phase transitions, and we demonstrate this using computer simulations. These strings are heavier than single-winding strings and…
Using the formalism developed in a previous paper we analyze the cosmological implications of our conclusions concerning the scaling behaviour of a network of cosmic strings, in particular the idea that once gravitational back-reaction…
In this lecture we review some of the recent developments in string theory on an introductory and qualitative level. In particular we focus on S-T-U dualities of toroidally compactified ten-dimensional string theories and outline the…
In string theory, the traditional picture of a Universe that emerges from the inflation of a very small and highly curved space-time patch is a possibility, not a necessity: quite different initial conditions are possible, and not…
Ever since its birth, up until its present development, the major role of string theory involves being the best candidate for the theory of quantum gravity and other species of interactions. In the present work, we would like to accomplish…
String theory suggests modifications of our spacetime such as extra dimensions and the existence of a mininal length scale. In models with addidional dimensions, the Planck scale can be lowered to values accessible by future colliders.…
I describe our understanding of physics near the planck length, in particular the great progress of the last four years in string theory. Superstring theory, and a recent extension called M theory, are leading candidates for a quantum…
The cosmic string theory for cosmological fluctuations is a good example of healthy scientific progress in cosmology. It is a well defined physically motivated model that has been tested by cosmological observations and has been ruled out…
We briefly review three aspects of string cosmology: (1) the ``stochastic'' approach to the pre-big bang scenario, (2) the presence of chaos in the generic cosmological solutions of the tree-level low-energy effective actions coming out of…
String cosmology aims at providing a reliable description of the very early Universe in the regime where standard-model physics is no longer appropriate, and where we can safely apply the basic ingredients of superstring models such as…
String theory provides the only consistent framework so far that unifies all interactions including gravity. We discuss gravity and cosmology in string theory. Conventional notions from general relativity like geometry, topology etc. are…
We consider conditions under which a universe contracting towards a big crunch can make a transition to an expanding big bang universe. A promising example is 11-dimensional M-theory in which the eleventh dimension collapses, bounces, and…
The strong coupling dynamics of string theories in dimension $d\geq 4$ are studied. It is argued, among other things, that eleven-dimensional supergravity arises as a low energy limit of the ten-dimensional Type IIA superstring, and that a…
We demonstrate that string consistency in four spacetime dimensions leads to a spectrum of string states which satisfies the supertrace constraints Str(M^0)=0 and Str(M^2)=\Lambda at tree level, where \Lambda is the one-loop string…
A brief discussion is presented assessing the achievements and challenges of string phenomenology: the subfield dedicated to study the potential for string theory to make contact with particle physics and cosmology. Building from the well…