Related papers: Moduli Stabilization in String Gas Cosmology
It has long been known that strings wound around incontractible cycles can play a vital role in cosmology. In particular, in a spacetime with toroidal spatial hypersurfaces, the dynamics of the winding modes may help yield three large…
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,…
When moduli roll in the early universe, all physical scales - including string tensions - simultaneously evolve. The dynamics of cosmic string loops with time-varying tension can produce cosmic string loop trackers in which most of the…
Making use of the wealth of new observational data coming from the sky it is possible to constrain particle physics theories beyond the Standard Model. One way to do this is illustrated in this article: a subset of theories admits cosmic…
We investigate the stability of the electroweak Z-string at high temperatures. Our results show that while finite temperature corrections can improve the stability of the Z-string, their effect is not strong enough to stabilize the Z-string…
I review basic forces on moduli that lead to their stabilization, for example in the supercritical and KKLT models of de Sitter space in string theory, as well as an $AdS_4\times S^3\times S^3$ model I include which is not published…
It is well-known that Scherk-Schwarz compactifications in string theory have a tachyon in the closed string spectrum appearing for a critical value of a compact radius. The tachyon can be removed by an appropriate orientifold projection in…
We consider the anisotropic evolution of spatial dimensions and the stabilization of internal dimensions in the framework of brane gas cosmology. We observe that the bulk RR field can give an effective potential which prevents the internal…
Aspects of string cosmology for critical and non-critical strings are discussed emphasizing the necessity to account for the dilaton dynamics for a proper incorporation of ``large - small" duality. This drastically modifies the intuition…
Most current cosmological models of the very early universe are based on local point particle effective field theories coupled to gravity. I will discuss some conceptual limitations of this approach and argue that an improved description of…
We construct flux-stabilised IIB compactifications whose extra dimensions (EDs) have very different sizes, and use these to describe several vacua with a TeV string scale. Because we can access regimes where 2 dimensions are hierarchically…
A generic feature of string compactifications is the presence of many scalar fields, called moduli. Moduli are usually displaced from their post-inflationary minimum during inflation. Their relaxation to the minimum could lead to the…
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…
We review the status of String Gas Cosmology after the 2015 Planck data release. String gas cosmology predicts an almost scale-invariant spectrum of cosmological perturbations with a slight red tilt, like the simplest inflationary models.…
We investigate the cosmological consequences of particle physics theories that admit stable loops of superconducting cosmic string - {\it vortons}. General symmetry breaking schemes are considered, in which strings are formed at one energy…
We present a new scenario for the moduli stabilization with a very small but nonzero positive cosmological constant $\lambda$. In this scenario the complex structure moduli are still stabilized by the three-form fluxes as in the usual flux…
We study the cosmological inflation from the viewpoint of the moduli stabilization. We study the scenario that the superpotential has a large value during the inflation era enough to stabilize moduli, but it is small in the true vacuum.…
We review the current observational status of string cosmology when confronted with experimental datasets. We begin by defining common observational parameters and discuss how they are determined for a given model. Then we review the…
String theory axions appear to be promising candidates for explaining cosmological constant via quintessence. In this paper, we study conditions on the string compactifications under which axion quintessence can happen. For sufficiently…
In this thesis we investigate the microphysics of cosmic strings in non-minimal quantum field theories. In particular we consider theories in which fermion fields couple to the strings, and those with larger symmetry groups, such as grand…