Related papers: Conditions for Viable Affleck-Dine Baryogenesis --…
We discuss the mechanism of reheating in pre-big bang string cosmology and we calculate the amount of moduli and gravitinos produced gravitationally and in scattering processes of the thermal bath. We find that this abundance always exceeds…
Non-supersymmetric brane world scenarios in string theory display perturbative instabilities that usually involve run-away potentials for scalar moduli fields. We investigate in the framework of intersecting brane worlds whether the leading…
It is shown that the minimal Left-Right symmetric model admits cosmic string, domain wall and conditionally, monopole solutions. The strings arise when the $SU(2)_R$ is broken and can either be destabilized at the electroweak scale or…
We review the theory and phenomenology of effective supergravity theories based on orbifold compactifications of the weakly-coupled heterotic string. In particular, we consider theories in which the four-dimensional theory displays target…
We derive sum rules for the sparticle masses in different models of supersymmetry breaking. This includes the gravity mediated models (SUGRA models) as well as models in which supersymmetry breaking terms are induced by super-Weyl anomaly…
We investigate the possibility of obtaining inflationary solutions of the slow roll type from a low energy Lagrangian coming from superstrings. The advantage of such an approach is that in these theories the scalar potential has only one…
In the framework of Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theories (SUSY GUTs), the universe undergoes a cascade of symmetry breakings, during which topological defects can be formed. We address the question of the probability of cosmic string…
We study a scenario for baryogenesis in modular cosmology and discuss its implications for the moduli stabilization mechanism and the supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking scale. If moduli fields dominate the Universe and decay into the standard…
An important unsolved problem that affects practically all attempts to connect string theory to cosmology and phenomenology is how to distinguish effective field theories belonging to the string landscape from those that are not consistent…
A new mechanism for baryogenesis is proposed in the context of an extended Brans-Dicke (BD) theory. We generalize the BD scalar to complex field with CP violating coupling to curvature and show that the charged BD current can be enhanced…
We study N=1 Supergravity inflation in the context of the braneworld scenario. Particular attention is paid to the problem of the onset of inflation at sub-Planckian field values and the ensued inflationary observables. We find that the…
We study the possibility of extended inflation in the effective theory of gravity from strings compactified to four dimensions and find that it strongly depends on the mechanism of supersymmetry breaking. We consider a general class of…
In this review we show that a Clifford algebra possesses a unique irreducible representation; the spinor representation. We discuss what types of spinors can exist in Minkowski space-times and we explain how to construct all the…
Electroweak baryogenesis is a simple and attractive candidate mechanism for generating the observed baryon asymmetry in the Universe. Its viability is sometimes investigated in terms of an effective field theory of the Standard Model…
We consider the generation of large-scale magnetic fields in slow-roll inflation. The inflaton field is described in a supergravity framework where the conformal invariance of the electromagnetic field is generically and naturally broken.…
We revisit phenomenological as well as string-theoretical aspects of D-brane inflation cosmological models. Phenomenologically these models stand out on par with $\alpha$-attractors, as models with Planck-compatible values of $n_s$, moving…
We argue that the behavior of string theory at high temperature and high longitudinal boosts, combined with the emergence of p-branes as necessary ingredients in various string dualities, point to a possible reformulation of strings, as…
In effective supergravity theories following from the superstring, a modulus field can quite naturally set the neccessary initial conditions for successful cosmological inflation to be driven by a hidden sector scalar field. The leading…
We study inflationary potentials in the framework of superstring theories. Successful inflation may occur due to chiral fields, but only after the dilaton and moduli are stabilized. This is achieved by demanding an S-duality invariant…
We investigate the effect of non-canonical kinetic terms on inflation in supergravity. We find that the biggest impact of such higher-derivative kinetic terms is due to the corrections to the potential that they induce via their effect on…