Related papers: Cosmology of Light Moduli
Cosmology in extended theories of gravity is considered assuming the Palatini variational principle, for which the metric and connection are independent variables. The field equations are derived to linear order in perturbations about the…
The gravitino may well play an important role in cosmology, not only because its interactions are Planck-suppressed and therefore long-lived, but also because it is copiously produced via various processes such as particle scatterings in…
The Large Volume Scenario for getting a non-supersymmetric vacuum in type IIB string theory leads, through the Weyl anomaly and renormalization group running, to an interesting phenomenology. However, for gravitino masses below 500 TeV…
We examine the $X$-ray spectrum from the decay of the dark-matter moduli with mass $\sim {\cal O}(100)$keV, in particular, paying attention to the line spectrum from the moduli trapped in the halo of our galaxy. It is found that with the…
There can arise ubiquitous ultra-light scalar fields in the Universe, such as the pseudo-Goldstone bosons from the spontaneous breaking of an approximate symmetry, which can make a partial contribution to the dark matter and affect the…
We study moduli dependent threshold corrections to gravitational couplings in the case of the heterotic string compactified on a symmetric orbifold, for untwisted moduli, extending previous analysis on gauge couplings. Like in the gauge…
We study low-scale gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking models with a very light gravitino of mass $\mathcal{O}(1)$ eV. The cosmological upper bound on the gravitino mass and the collider constraints on the sparticle masses give a…
The light neutrino masses are at present most stringently constraint via cosmological probes. In particular the Planck collaboration reports $ \sum m_\nu \leq 0.12\,\mathrm{eV}$ at $95\%$ CL within the standard cosmological model. This is…
We discuss some recent attempts to reconcile cosmology with supergravity and M/string theory. First of all, we point out that in extended supergravities the scalar masses are quantized in terms of the cosmological constant in de Sitter…
Cosmology is at present one of the most powerful probes of neutrino properties. The advent of precision data from the cosmic microwave background and large scale structure has allowed for a very strong bound on the neutrino mass. Here, I…
We consider the cosmological role of the scalar fields generated by the compactification of 11-dimensional Einstein gravity on a 7D elliptic twisted torus, which has the attractive features of giving rise to a positive semi-definite…
We study axion strings of hyperlight axions coupled to photons. Hyperlight axions -- axions lighter than Hubble at recombination -- are a generic prediction of the string axiverse. These axions strings produce a distinct quantized…
The commonly accepted notion of a weak unified coupling $\alpha_X \approx 0.04$, based on the assumption of the MSSM--spectrum, is questioned. It is suggested that the four--dimensional unified string coupling should very likely have an…
This paper investigates the parameter space of theories with gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking leading to gravitino (cold) dark matter with mass m_{3/2}= 1keV - 10MeV. We pay particular attention to the cosmological role of messenger…
Saxino decay can generate significant cosmological entropy, and hence dilute theoretical estimates of the present mass density of a given particle species. The dilution factor depends on the saxino and axion masses, and is constrained by…
In theories beyond the Standard Model, in particular in theories with extra spatial dimensions such as superstring theory, there are a large number of scalar fields which appear in the low energy effective action. These moduli fields must…
Two populations of axions can contribute to cold dark matter: the classical field produced via the misalignment mechanism, and the modes produced in the decay of strings. The classical field has extra pressure, as compared to WIMPs, which…
Nonlinearities in a realistic axion field potential may play an important role in the cosmological dynamics. In this paper we use the Boltzmann code CLASS to solve the background and linear perturbations evolution of an axion field and…
In some string compactifications, for instance the recently proposed KKLT set-up, light moduli are stabilized by nonperturbative effects at supersymmetric AdS vacuum which is lifted to a dS vacuum by supersymmetry breaking uplifting…
In the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, the higgsinos can have masses around the electroweak scale, while the other supersymmetric particles have TeV-scale masses. This happens in models of gauge-mediated SUSY breaking with a high…