Related papers: Inflation, Large Branes, and the Shape of Space
Seiberg and Witten have shown that the non-perturbative stability of string physics on conformally compactified spacetimes is related to the behaviour of the areas and volumes of certain branes as the brane is moved towards infinity. If, as…
In this lecture I will review the present status of inflation within string-based brane-world scenarios. The idea is to start from a supersymmetric configuration with two parallel static Dp-branes, and slightly break the supersymmetry…
We build a number of integrable one--scalar spatially flat cosmologies, which play a natural role in inflationary scenarios, examine their behavior in several cases and draw from them some general lessons on this type of systems, whose…
We illustrate a framework for constructing models of chaotic inflation where the inflaton is the position of a D3 brane along the universal cover of a string compactification. In our scenario, a brane rolls many times around a non-trivial…
We consider a cosmological scenario within the KKLT framework for moduli stabilization in string theory. The universal open string tachyon of decaying non-BPS D-brane configurations is proposed to drive eternal topological inflation.…
We investigate the embedding of brane inflation into stable compactifications of string theory. At first sight a warped compactification geometry seems to produce a naturally flat inflaton potential, evading one well-known difficulty of…
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…
Classic inflation, the theory described in textbooks, is based on the idea that, beginning from typical initial conditions and assuming a simple inflaton potential with a minimum of fine-tuning, inflation can create exponentially large…
We describe a simple mechanism that can lead to inflation within string-based brane-world scenarios. The idea is to start from a supersymmetric configuration with two parallel static Dp-branes, and slightly break the supersymmetry…
The inflationary scenarios suggested by the duality properties of string cosmology in the Brans-Dicke (or String) frame are shown to correspond to accelerated contraction (deflation) when Weyl-transformed to the Einstein frame. We point out…
It was recently pointed out that the fundamental Planck mass could be close to the TeV scale with the observed weakness of gravity at long distances being due the existence of new sub-millimeter spatial dimensions. In this picture the…
We analyse the cosmological implications of brane-antibrane systems in string-theoretic orbifold and orientifold models. In a class of realistic models, consistency conditions require branes and antibranes to be stuck at different fixed…
When Inflation is embedded in a fundamental theory, such as string theory, it typically begins when the Universe is already substantially larger than the fundamental scale [such as the one defined by the string length scale]. This is…
We study an effective four-dimensional theory with an action with two scalar fields minimally coupled to gravity, and with a matter action which couples to the two scalar fields via an overall field-dependent coefficient in the action. Such…
We consider inflation driven near a saddle point in a higher dimensional field space, which is the most likely type of slow roll inflation on the string theoretical landscape; anthropic arguments need to be invoked in order to find a…
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…
We explore compactifications of the form of three tori with a general genus and one circle in the framework of 11D supergravity. By imposing suitable gauge conditions and boundary conditions, we find that the FRW universe with four extended…
In this thesis, we explore three phenomenological alternatives to the current paradigm of the standard inflationary big bang scenario. The three alternative themes are spin torsion (or Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama) theories, extra…
It was pointed out that brane-anti-brane inflation without warped geometry is not viable due to compactification effects (in the simplified scenario where the inflaton is decoupled from the compactification moduli). We show that the…
We generalise Starobinsky's model of inflation to space-times with $D>4$ dimensions, where $D-4$ dimensions are compactified on a suitable manifold. The $D$-dimensional action features Einstein-Hilbert gravity, a higher-order curvature…