Related papers: Quintessence and Varying \alpha from Shape Moduli
We present a comprehensive study of the observational constraints on spatially flat cosmological models containing a mixture of matter and quintessence --- a time varying, spatially inhomogeneous component of the energy density of the…
Various classes of exotic singularity models have been studied as possible mimic models for the observed recent acceleration of the universe. Here we further study one of these classes and, under the assumption that they are…
It was recently pointed out that the fundamental Planck mass could be close to the TeV scale with the observed weakness of gravity at long distances being due the existence of new sub-millimeter spatial dimensions. In this picture the…
We consider a class of models with infinite extra dimension, where bulk space does not possess SO(1,3) invariance, but Lorentz invariance emerges as an approximate symmetry of the low-energy effective theory. In these models, the maximum…
The fundamental constants at recombination can differ from their present-day values due to degeneracies in cosmological parameters, raising the possibility of yet-undiscovered physics coupled directly to the Standard Model. We study the…
We obtain localized field configurations with finite energy in a ($2+1$)-dimensional model with Maxwell and Chern-Simons gauge terms coupled to a massive complex scalar field. These non-topological solitons are characterized by the $U(1)$…
We show that even in the simple framework of pure Kaluza-Klein gravity the shape moduli can generate potentials supporting inflation and/or quintessence. Using the shape moduli as the inflaton or quintessence-field has the additional…
A finite vacuum energy density implies the existence of a UV scale for gravitational modes. This gives a phenomenological scale to the dynamical equations governing the cosmological expansion that must satisfy constraints consistent with…
Recently it has been pointed out that the characteristic quantum-gravity scale could be as low as the weak scale in theories with gravity propagating in higher dimensions. The observed smallness of Newton's constant is a consequence of the…
A nearly-massless, slowly-rolling scalar field $\phi$ may provide most of the energy density of the current universe. One potential difficulty with this idea is that couplings to ordinary matter, even if suppressed by the Planck scale,…
The COBE microwave background temperature fluctuations and the abundance of local rich clusters of galaxies provide the two most powerful constraints on cosmological models. When all variants of the standard cold dark matter (CDM) model are…
Volume stabilization in models with flat extra dimension could follow from vacuum energy residing in the bulk when translational invariance is spontaneously broken. We study a simple toy model that exemplifies this mechanism which considers…
A formalism is presented to construct a non-perturbative Grand Unified Theory when gravitational Planck-scale phenomena are included. The fundamental object on the Planck scale is the three-torus T^3 from which the known properties of…
Spatial and temporal variations in the electron-to-proton mass ratio, mu, and in the fine-structure constant, alpha, are predicted in non-Standard models aimed to explain the nature of dark energy. Among them the so-called chameleon-like…
In Quantum Gravity (QG), large moduli values lead to towers of exponentially light states, making the QG cut-off field-dependent. In 4D supersymmetric (SUSY) theories, this cut-off is set by the species scale $\Lambda(z_i, \bar{z}_i)$,…
We consider string inspired cosmology on a solitary $D3$-brane moving in the background of a ring of branes located on a circle of radius $R$. The motion of the $D3$-brane transverse to the plane of the ring gives rise to a radion field…
Condensed matter systems provide alternative `vacua' exhibiting emergent low-energy properties drastically different from those of the standard model. A case in point is the emergent quantum electrodynamics (QED) in the fractionalized…
We investigate the cosmological expansion of the 3D space in a 6D model compactified on a sphere, beyond the 4D effective theory analysis. We focus on a case that the initial temperature is higher than the compactification scale. In such a…
We show that the difference between the theoretically expected and measured by WMAP amplitude of the quadrupole fluctuations of CMB can be related to the impact of the anisotropic curvature of the homogeneous universe dominated by the dark…
We consider classically scale-invariant theories with non-minimally coupled scalar fields, where the Planck mass and the hierarchy of physical scales are dynamically generated. The classical theories possess a fixed point, where scale…