Related papers: Cosmic Strings and the String Dilaton
The Cosmological Constant Problem is re-examined from an effective field theory perspective. While the connection between gravity and particle physics has not been experimentally probed in the quantum regime, it is severely constrained by…
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…
In this paper, we fully investigate the cosmological effects of the moduli dependent one-loop corrections to the gravitational couplings of the string effective action to explain the cosmic acceleration problem in early (and/or late)…
We investigate the nature of ordinary cosmic vortices in some scalar-tensor extensions of gravity. We find solutions for which the dilaton field condenses inside the vortex core. These solutions can be interpreted as raising the degeneracy…
We show from theoretical considerations, that if the graviton is massive, its mass is constrained to be about $10^{-32}~eV/c^2$. This estimate is consistent with those obtained from experiments, including the recent gravitational wave…
We study Abelian strings in a fixed de Sitter background. We find that the gauge and Higgs fields extend smoothly across the cosmological horizon and that the string solutions have oscillating scalar fields outside the cosmological horizon…
It is pointed out that string-loop modifications of the low-energy matter couplings of the dilaton may provide a mechanism for fixing the vacuum expectation value of a massless dilaton in a way which is naturally compatible with existing…
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…
Macroscopic fundamental and Dirichlet strings have several potential instabilities: breakage, tachyon decays, and confinement by axion domain walls. We investigate the conditions under which metastable strings can exist, and we find that…
We consider the low energy phenomenology of superstrings. In particular we analyse supersymmetry breaking via gaugino condensate and we compare the phenomenology of the two different approaches to stabilize the dilaton field. We study the…
We consider the possible existence of gravitationally bound stringlike objects in the framework of the generalized hybrid metric-Palatini gravity theory, in which the gravitational action is represented by an arbitrary function of the Ricci…
We investigate the constraints that can be placed on the cosmic string tension by using the current Pulsar Timing Array limits on the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). We have developed a code to compute the spectrum of…
Cosmic strings are generic cosmological predictions of many extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics, such as a $U(1)^\prime$ symmetry breaking phase transition in the early universe or remnants of superstring theory. Unlike…
We demonstrate that string motivated inflation ending via tachyonic instability leaves a detectable imprint on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation by virtue of the excitation of non-Gaussian gravitational fluctuations. The…
We calculate the contribution of cosmic strings arising from a phase transition in the early universe, or cosmic superstrings arising from brane inflation, to the cosmic 21 cm power spectrum at redshifts z > 30. Future experiments can…
Although cosmic string scenario for galaxy formation is disfavored by CMB data, it is of great interest in the generation of cosmic gravitational-wave background. This research aims to develop an algorithm to extract cosmic…
Cosmic strings of the GUT scale, generically formed during the SSB of supersymmetric hybrid inflation, are compatible with the most recent CMB data. The strong constraints on the allowed cosmic strings contribution to the measured…
A synthesis of previous work done on the microscopic structure of cosmic strings in realistic models is made and reveals that strings are expected to be not only superconducting in the sense of Witten, but also generically current-carrying,…
Understanding axion cosmology has important experimental consequences since it constrains the range of allowed values for the axion mass. In the standard thermal scenario, which assumes Peccei-Quinn symmetry restoration after inflation, an…
We study the structure of cosmic strings produced at the breaking of an anomalous U(1) gauge symmetry present in many superstring compactification models. We show that their coupling with the axion necessary in order to cancel the anomalies…