Related papers: Overproduction of cosmic superstrings
In these lectures, I review the current status of cosmic strings and cosmic superstrings. I first discuss topological defects in the context of Grand Unified Theories, focusing in particular in cosmic strings arising as gauge theory…
This thesis is dedicated to the study of inflationary scenarios based on string theory. Inflation is a brief period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe which gives natural explanations for problems of the Standard Big Bang…
Hybrid inflation within supersymmetric grand unified theories, as well as inflation through brane collisions within braneworld cosmological models, lead to the formation of one-dimensional defects. Observational data, mainly from the cosmic…
Recently it was observed that the hyperbolic compactification of M/string theory related to S-branes may lead to a transient period of acceleration of the universe. We study time evolution of the corresponding effective 4d cosmological…
The time-varying density of D-branes and anti-D-branes in an expanding universe is calculated. The D-brane anti-brane annihilation rate is shown to be too small to compete with the expansion rate of a FRW type universe and the branes…
We find successful models of D-brane/anti-brane inflation within a string context. We work within the GKP-KKLT class of type IIB string vacua for which many moduli are stabilized through fluxes, as recently modified to include `realistic'…
We consider the cosmological evolution of the three-brane in the background of type IIB string theory. For two different backgrounds which give nontrivial dilaton profile we have derived the Friedman-like equations. These give the…
We study a new framework for brane-antibrane inflation where moduli stabilisation relies purely on perturbative corrections to the effective action. This guarantees that the model does not suffer from the eta-problem. The inflationary…
Cosmology motivated by string theory has been studied extensively in the recent literature. String theory is promising because it has interesting features such as unifying gravity, electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces. However,…
Cosmic superstrings are introduced to non-experts. First D-branes and $(p,q)$ strings are discussed. Then we explain how tachyon condensation in the early universe may have produced F, D and $(p,q)$ strings. Warped geometries which can…
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…
We review the recent developments in obtaining accelerating cosmologies and/or inflation from higher-dimensional gravitational theories, in particular superstring theories in ten dimensions and M-theory in eleven dimensions. We first…
Certain configurations of D-branes, for example wrong dimensional branes or the brane-antibrane system, are unstable to decay. This instability is described by the appearance of a tachyonic mode in the spectrum of open strings ending on the…
We reconstruct the tachyon effective action for unstable D-branes in superstring theory by examining its behaviour near exactly marginal deformations, where the ambigous higher derivative terms can be eliminated. We then compare this action…
We argue that it may be possible to reheat the universe after inflation driven by D-brane annihilation, due to the coupling of massless fields to the time-dependent tachyon condensate which describes the annihilation process. This mechanism…
In this paper we investigate the theory behind the results in [11]. In [11] we calculated the magnetic dipole moment of the muon and the electric dipole moments of the muon, electron and the neutron (in a simple quark model) to first order…
In string models with "brane supersymmetry breaking" exponential potentials emerge at (closed-string) tree level but are not accompanied by tachyons. Potentials of this type have long been a source of embarrassment in flat space, but can…
It has been conjectured that at the stationary point of the tachyon potential for the non-BPS D-brane or brane-anti-D-brane pair, the negative energy density cancels the brane tension. We study this conjecture using a cubic superstring…
We propose that under certain conditions the universal open string tachyon can drive topological inflation in moduli stabilised frameworks. Namely, the presence of electric field in the world volume of the D-brane can slow down its decay…
D-brane configurations containing fundamental strings are constructed as classical solutions of Yang-Mills theory. The fundamental strings in these systems stretch between D-branes. In the case of D1-branes, this construction gives smooth…