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The interplay between string theory and early-universe cosmology offers promising avenues to explore high-energy regimes where the standard single-field slow-roll model may no longer provide an accurate description. One intriguing scenario…
The theory of cosmological perturbations is the main tool which connects theories of the early universe (based on new fundamental physics such as string theory) with cosmological observations. In these lectures, I will provide an…
We motivate the study of chiral cosmic strings through a scenario of structure formation which mixes D-term inflation and strings. We then discuss some properties of chiral cosmic strings, and results regarding their evolution and possible…
The braneworld cosmology, in which our universe is imbedded as a hypersurface in a higher dimensional bulk, has the peculiar property that the inflationary consistency relation derived in a four-dimensional cosmology persists. This…
A novel mechanism to produce a cosmic network of fundamental superstrings based on a time-varying string tension has been recently proposed. It has been found that fundamental superstrings can grow in a kinating background driven by the…
We investigate the early universe evolution in the context of brane inflation driven by a supergravity-inspired $\arctan$ potential. We performed a slow-roll and a semi-analytical reheating analyses and obtained constraints on the…
We study the cosmological evolution of a D3-brane Universe in a type 0 string background. We follow the brane-universe along the radial coordinate of the background and we calculate the energy density which is induced on the brane because…
The eta problem is one of the most significant obstacles to building a successful inflationary model in string theory. Planck mass suppressed corrections to the inflaton potential generally lead to inflaton masses of order the Hubble scale…
This review article aims at presenting the theory of inflation. We first describe the background spacetime behavior during the slow-roll phase and analyze how inflation ends and the Universe reheats. Then, we present the theory of…
Recent BICEP2 detection of low-multipole B-mode polarization anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation supports the inflationary universe scenario and suggests a large inflaton field range. The latter feature can be achieved…
High-scale string inflationary models are in well-known tension with low-energy supersymmetry. A promising solution involves models where the inflaton is the volume of the extra dimensions so that the gravitino mass relaxes from large…
Inflationary cosmology is developed in the second Randall-Sundrum braneworld scenario, where the accelerated expansion arises through potentials that are too steep to drive inflation in conventional cosmology. A relationship between the…
String theory abounds with light scalar fields (the dilaton and various moduli) which create a host of observational problems, and notably some serious cosmological difficulties similar to the ones associated with the Polonyi field in the…
Fibre inflation is a specific string theory construction based on the Large Volume Scenario that produces an inflationary plateau. We outline its relation to $\alpha$-attractor models for inflation, with the cosmological sector originating…
We show that the use of higher dimensional wrapped branes can significantly extend the inflaton field range compared to brane inflation models which use D3-branes. We construct a simple inflationary model in terms of 5-branes wrapping a…
We study classical lump solutions in a warped throat where brane inflation takes place. Some of the solitonic or lump solutions that we study here are the (p,q) cosmic strings and their junctions, cosmic necklaces and semi-local strings and…
We construct time dependent BPS pp-wave brane solutions in the context of M-theory and type II supergravity. It is found that N-brane solutions we considered satisfy the crossing rule as S-brane solutions but 1/8 supersymmetry remains. By…
String cosmology aims at providing a reliable description of the very early Universe in the regime where standard-model physics is no longer appropriate, and where we can safely apply the basic ingredients of superstring models such as…
We consider a probe codimension-2 brane inflation scenario in a warped six-dimensional flux compactification. Our background model is Salam-Sezgin gauged supergravity with codimension-2 brane sources, which preserve N=1 supersymmetry. The…
Space-filling S-branes can mediate a transition between a contracting and an expanding universe in the Einstein frame. Following up on previous work that uncovered such bouncing solutions in the context of weakly coupled thermal…