Related papers: Comments on Cosmological Singularities in String T…
These proceedings are based on lectures delivered at the "RTN Winter School on Strings, Supergravity and Gauge Theories", CERN, January 16 - January 20, 2006. The school was mainly aimed at Ph.D. students and young postdocs. The lectures…
We study a class of four dimensional, anisotropic string backgrounds and analyse their expansion and singularity structure. In particular we will see how O(3,3) duality acts on this class.
We demonstrate that string consistency in four spacetime dimensions leads to a spectrum of string states which satisfies the supertrace constraints Str(M^0)=0 and Str(M^2)=\Lambda at tree level, where \Lambda is the one-loop string…
We find the general solution to Polchinski's classical scattering equations for $1+1$ dimensional string theory. This allows efficient computation of scattering amplitudes in the standard Liouville $\times$ $c=1$ background. Moreover, the…
Chiral cosmic strings are naturally produced at the end of D-term inflation and they may have interesting cosmological consequences. As was first proved by Carter and Peter, the equations of motion for chiral cosmic strings in Minkowski…
We consider backreaction due to production of massless strings in the background of a condensing closed string tachyon. Working in the region of weak tachyon, we find the modified equations of motion for massless strings with conformal…
We recently proposed a class of type IIB vacua that yield, at low energies, four--dimensional Minkowski spaces with broken supersymmetry and a constant string coupling. They are compactifications with an internal five-torus bearing a…
We show that, in the presence of a string gas, simple higher-derivative modifications to the effective action for gravity can lead to bouncing and cyclic cosmological models. The modifications bound the expansion rate and avoid…
String scattering amplitudes in the high energy asymptotic region have been studied by saddle point approximation. Recently, it was pointed out that infinitely many complex saddles contribute to string amplitudes even at tree-level after…
We give a non-technical outline of a program to study the (2,0) theories in six space-time dimensions. Away from the origin of their moduli space, these theories describe the interactions of tensor multiplets and self-dual spinning strings.…
The gravitational back-reaction is calculated for the conformally invariant scalar field within a black cosmic string interior with cosmological constant. Using the perturbed metric, the gravitational effects of the quantum field are…
We apply the point-splitting method to investigate vacuum fluctuations in the nonglobally hyperbolic background of a spinning cosmic string. Implementing renormalization by removing the Minkowski contribution it is shown that although the…
We study a d-dimensional FRW universe, containing a perfect fluid with p = w \rho and \frac{1} {d - 1} \le w \le 1, and find a correspondence principle similar to that of Horowitz and Polchinski in the black hole case. This principle…
We compute the string energy-momentum tensor and {\bf derive} the string equation of state from exact string dynamics in cosmological spacetimes. $1+1,~2+1$ and $D$-dimensional universes are treated for any expansion factor $R$. Strings…
We consider the Compton amplitude for the scattering of a photon and a (massless) ``electron/positron'' at one loop (i.e. genus one) in a four-dimensional fermionic heterotic string model. Starting from the bosonization of the world-sheet…
Recent work has provided a direct string calculation of the internal coordinate dependence of gauge field tadpoles on the orbifold C^3/Z_3. We investigate the structure of these profiles in momentum and coordinate space representations…
In this paper we examine the classical evolution of a cosmological model derived from the low-energy tree-level limit of a generic string theory. The action contains the metric, dilaton, central charge and an antisymmetric tensor field. We…
We present a conformal field theory -- obtained from a gauged WZW model -- that describes a closed, inhomogeneous expanding and recollapsing universe in $3+1$ dimensions. A possible violation of cosmic censorship is avoided because the…
Scattering amplitudes in $d+2$ dimensions can be expressed in terms of a conformal basis, for which the S-matrix behaves as a CFT correlation function on the celestial $d$-sphere. We explain how compact expressions for the full tree-level…
We show that when considering a scalar field scattering in a gravitating cosmic string spacetime, the standard partial-wave approach's scattering amplitude is singular. In order to avoid the divergence caused by the spacetime asymptotically…