Related papers: Moduli and Monopoles
It is shown that hypothetical neutrino-majoron coupling can suppress neutrino flavor oscillations in the early universe, in contrast to the usual weak interaction case. This reopens a window for a noticeable cosmological lepton asymmetry…
The evolution of moduli fields, which naturally appear in higher dimensional models such as brane worlds, and their effects on the anisotropies of the cosmological microwave background radiation is discussed.
We discuss the oscillations effects on neutrinos in the early Universe and update the cosmological constraints on the oscillation parameters. It is shown that sterile LOW solution to the solar neutrino problem is almost completely excluded…
Analytical solutions are obtained to the nonlinear equations describing neutrino oscillations when explicit neutrino-antineutrino asymmetries are present. Such a system occurs in the early Universe if neutrinos have a non-zero chemical…
Positively-curved, oscillatory universes are studied within the context of Loop Quantum Cosmology subject to a consistent semi-classical treatment. The semi-classical effects are reformulated in terms of an effective phantom fluid with a…
We investigate whether small perturbations can cause relaxation to quantum equilibrium over very long timescales. We consider in particular a two-dimensional harmonic oscillator, which can serve as a model of a field mode on expanding…
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…
Polygon spaces have been studied extensively, and yet missing from the literature is a simple property that every polygon has: dimension. This is distinct (possibly) from the dimension of the ambient space in which the polygon lives. A…
We discuss the amplification of magnetic fields by the small-scale dynamo, a process that could efficiently produce strong magnetic fields in the first galaxies. In addition, we derive constraints on the primordial field strength from the…
We revisit axion monodromy inflation in the context of UV-inspired models and point out that its cosmological observables are sensitive to heavy fields with masses far above the Hubble scale, such as the moduli of flux compactifications. By…
If the spatial curvature of the universe is positive, then the curvature term will always dominate at early enough times in a slow-rolling inflationary epoch. This enhances inflationary effects and hence puts limits on the possible number…
Monopole-antimonopole pairs connected by strings can be formed as topological defects in a sequence of cosmological phase transitions. Such hybrid defects typically decay early in the history of the universe but can still generate an…
We perform a detailed study of stringy moduli-driven cosmologies between the end of inflation and the commencement of the Hot Big Bang, including both the background and cosmological perturbations: a period that can cover half the lifetime…
Many models of supersymmetry breaking, in the context of either supergravity or superstring theories, predict the presence of particles with Planck-suppressed couplings and masses around the weak scale. These particles are generically…
This brief article reviews a recently proposed scenario of moduli stabilization constructed in the vicinity of a conifold locus in the complex structure moduli space. We discuss typical features of moduli stabilization due to the…
As one of the prime contributors to the interstellar medium energy budget, magnetic fields naturally play a part in shaping the evolution of galaxies. Galactic magnetic fields can originate from strong primordial magnetic fields provided…
While the number of metastable landscape vacua in string theory is vast, the number of supermoduli vacua which lead to distinct low energy physics is even larger, perhaps infinitely so. From the anthropic perspective it is therefore…
The basic properties of oscillons -- localized, long-lived, time-dependent scalar field configurations -- are briefly reviewed, including recent results demonstrating how their existence depends on the dimensionality of spacetime. Their…
In recent years it has been realised that pre-BBN decays of moduli can be a significant source of dark matter production, giving a `non-thermal WIMP miracle' and substantially reduced fine-tuning in cosmological axion physics. We study…
We investigate vacuum decays in the early Universe in the presence of curvature perturbations. For sufficiently large perturbations associated with over-densities, we find that the bounce solution develops an oscillating middle stage near…