Related papers: The Phantom Divide in String Gas Cosmology
We investigate the possibility that part of the dark matter is not made out of the usual cold dark matter (CDM) dustlike particles, but is under the form of a fluid of strings with barotropic factor $w_s = -1/3$ of cosmic origin. To this…
Non-singular two and three dimensional string cosmologies are constructed using the exact conformal field theories corresponding to SO(2,1)/SO(1,1) and SO(2,2)/SO(2,1). All semi-classical curvature singularities are canceled in the exact…
The cosmological "equation of state parameter", w, is equal to -1 for a true cosmological constant, and is greater than -1 for quintessence. There is a widespread reluctance to consider the remaining possibility, w < -1, though in fact…
The cosmological observations provide a strong evidence that there is a positive cosmological constant in our universe and thus the spacetime is asymptotical de Sitter space. The conjecture of gravity as the weakest force in the…
We study a symmetry, schematically Energy -> - Energy, which suppresses matter contributions to the cosmological constant. The requisite negative energy fluctuations are identified with a "ghost" copy of the Standard Model. Gravity…
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…
Progress on string theory in curved spacetimes since 1992 are reviewed. After a short introduction on strings in Minkowski and curved spacetimes, we focus on strings in cosmological spacetimes. The classical behaviour of strings in FRW and…
We show that it is possible to combine an early phase of String Gas Cosmology which can explain the origin of the observed structures on cosmological scales with a short later period of power law inflation which creates spatial flatness.…
The properties of future singularities are investigated in the universe dominated by dark energy including the phantom-type fluid. We classify the finite-time singularities into four classes and explicitly present the models which give rise…
Non-singular two and three dimensional string cosmologies are constructed using the exact conformal field theories corresponding to SO(2,1)/SO(1,1) and SO(2,2)/SO(2,1). {\it All} semi-classical curvature singularities are canceled in the…
Some time ago we have suggested that positive vacuum energy exhibits a finite quantum break time, which can be a signal that a positive cosmological constant is inconsistent. From the requirement that Universe never undergoes through…
Cosmic strings, a hot subject in the 1980's and early 1990's, lost its appeal when it was found that it leads to inconsistencies in the power spectrum of the measured cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies. However,…
Faced by recent evidence for a flat universe dominated by dark energy, cosmologists grapple with deep cosmic enigmas such as the cosmological constant problem, extreme fine-tuning and the cosmic coincidence problem. The extent to which we…
The weakly coupled vacuum of $E_8\otimes E_8$ heterotic string theory remains an attractive scenario for phenomenolgy and cosmology. The particle spectrum is reviewed and the issues of gauge coupling unification, dilaton stabilization and…
We consider the spacetime dynamics of a gas of closed strings in the context of General Relativity in a background of arbitrary spatial dimensions. Our motivation is primarily late time String Gas Cosmology, where such a spacetime picture…
The main goal of string phenomenology is to find realistic models of particle physics and cosmology within string theory. Dark bubble cosmology is an alternative to string compactifications, where our universe lives on a bubble expanding in…
By studying the present cosmological data, particularly on CMB, SNeIA and LSS, we find that the future fate of the universe, for simple linear models of the dark energy equation-of-state, can vary between the extremes of (I) a divergence of…
One possible way to explain the observed effective dark energy equation of state crossing $w=-1$ (the phantom divide) is through modified gravity. A key point is to not view the expansion history in isolation but to take into account the…
In the modified measure formulation the string tension appear as an additional dynamical degree of freedom and these tensions are not universal, but rather each string generates its own tension, which can have a different value for each…
We study generic single-field dark energy models, by a parametrization of the most general theory of their perturbations around a given background, including higher derivative terms. In appropriate limits this approach reproduces standard…