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It is speculated how dark energy in a brane world can help reconcile an infinitely cyclic cosmology with the second law of thermodynamics. A cyclic cosmology is described, in which dark energy leads to a turnaround at a time, extremely…
The presence of dark energy in the Universe is inferred directly and indirectly from a large body of observational evidence. The simplest and most theoretically appealing possibility is the vacuum energy density (cosmological constant).…
Inflationary cosmology is the leading explanation of the very early universe. Many different models of inflation have been constructed which fit current observational data. In this work theoretical and numerical methods for constraining the…
Baryon-density perturbations of large amplitude may exist if they are compensated by dark-matter perturbations so that the total density remains unchanged. Big-bang nucleosynthesis and galaxy clusters allow the amplitudes of these…
Supersymmetry and string theory suggest the existence of light moduli. Their presence, or absence, controls the realization of supersymmetry at low energies. If there are no such fields, or if all such fields are fixed in a supersymmetric…
We demonstrate that a gas of wrapped branes in the early Universe can help resolve the cosmological Dine-Seiberg/Brustein-Steinhardt overshoot problem in the context of moduli stabilization with steep potentials in string theory. Starting…
We study the motion of a BPS D3-brane in the NS5-brane ring background. The radion field becomes tachyonic in this geometrical set up. We investigate the potential of this geometrical tachyon in the cosmological scenario for inflation as…
We summarize three recent efforts to constrain the first few moments of cosmic creation before and during the epoch of inflation. We consider two means to explain a slight dip in the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background for…
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…
Cosmic strings formed during inflation are expected to be either diluted over super-Hubble distances, i.e., invisible today, or to have crossed our past light cone very recently. We discuss the latter situation in which a few strings…
Space-based missions studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have progressively refined the parameter space in conventional models of inflation shortly ($\sim 10^{-37}$ seconds) after the big bang. While most inflationary scenarios…
Dark matter may be coupled to dark radiation: light degrees of freedom that mediate forces between dark sector particles. Cosmological constraints favor dark radiation that is colder than Standard Model radiation. In models with fixed…
We critically review the role of cosmological moduli in determining the post-inflationary history of the universe. Moduli are ubiquitous in string and M-theory constructions of beyond the Standard Model physics, where they parametrize the…
Based on a possible solution to the tetron spin problem, a modification of the standard Big Bang scenario is suggested, where the advent of a spacetime manifold is connected to the appearance of tetronic bound states. The metric tensor is…
Cosmological production of scalar, non-minimally coupled dark matter depends on the specifics of the inflationary model under consideration. We analyze both Starobinsky inflation and a quadratic potential, solve the full background…
The most prominent successes of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) models of dark matter are at comoving scales of megaparsecs. At kiloparsec scales they face challenges in explaining the density profiles, abundances and phase space…
The apparent alignment of the cosmic microwave background multipoles on large scales challenges the standard cosmological model. Scalar field inflation is isotropic and cannot account for the observed alignment. We explore the imprints, a…
We compare the simplest realistic brane inflationary model to recent cosmological data, including WMAP 3-year cosmic microwave background (CMB) results, Sloan Digital Sky Survey luminous red galaxies (SDSS LRG) power spectrum data and…
Dark matter which interacts through a magnetic or electric dipole moment is an interesting possibility which may help to resolve the discrepancy between the DAMA annual modulation signal and the null results of other searches. In this…
A scenario of the inflaton evolution from cosmic inflation and matter creation to dark matter/dark energy today is presented. To start with, a model of the inflationary phase of the inflaton is introduced. The inflaton rolls down a hilltop…