Related papers: String Gas Cosmology
The Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background (SGWB) from cosmic superstrings offers one of the few known possibilities to test String Theory within current experimental reach. However, in order to be compatible with the existing…
String theory provides the only consistent framework so far that unifies all interactions including gravity. We discuss gravity and cosmology in string theory. Conventional notions from general relativity like geometry, topology etc. are…
We consider the effects of a gas of closed strings (treated quantum mechanically) on a background where one dimension is compactified on a circle. After we address the effects of a time dependent background on aspects of the string spectrum…
Cosmic strings, topological defects predicted by high-energy theories, may contribute to the late-time expansion of the Universe, effectively mimicking dynamical dark energy. We investigate four phenomenological extensions of the…
A scenario which overcomes the well-known cosmological overshoot problem associated with stabilizing moduli with steep potentials in string theory is proposed. Our proposal relies on the fact that moduli potentials are very steep and that…
As a most promising candidate for quantum theory of the gravity, the superstring theory has attracted many researchers including cosmologists. It is expected that the cosmological initial singularity is avoided within the context of the…
We consider F-strings with arbitrary configurations in the Minkowski directions of a higher-dimensional spacetime, which also wrap and spin around $S^1$ subcycles of constant radius in an arbitrary internal manifold, and determine the…
We consider the effect of string inhomogeneities on the time dependent background of Brane Gas Cosmology. We derive the equations governing the linear perturbations of the dilaton-gravity background in the presence of string matter sources.…
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…
The Standard Model is the low-energy limit of a microscopic theory which includes extra dimensions and new symmetries. A part of my thesis consisted in constructing a new class of models with two extra dimensions. We showed that these…
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…
Over the past decade it has become clear that fundamental strings are not the only fundamental degrees of freedom in string theory. D-branes are also part of the spectrum of fundamental states. In this paper we explore some possible effects…
Theories of the cosmological constant fall into two classes, those in which the vacuum energy is fixed by the fundamental theory and those in which it is adjustable in some way. For each class we discuss key challenges. The string theory…
Cosmic (super)strings offer promising ways to test ideas about the early universe and physics at high energies. While in field theory constructions their tension is usually assumed to be constant (or at most slowly-varying), this is often…
For suitable cosmological backgrounds, thermal fluctuations of a gas of strings can generate a scale-invariant spectrum of cosmological fluctuations without requiring a phase of inflationary expansion. We highlight the key points of this…
String theory posesses numerous axion candidates. The recent realization that the compactification radius in string theory might be large means that these states can solve the strong CP problem. This still leaves the question of the…
We conduct a systematic search for a viable string/M-theory cosmology, focusing on cosmologies that include an era of slow-roll inflation, after which the moduli are stabilized and the Universe is in a state with an acceptably small…
We study string dynamics in the early universe. Our motivation is the proposal of Brandenberger and Vafa, that string winding modes may play a key role in decompactifying three spatial dimensions. We model the universe as a homogeneous but…
Realizing dark energy and the observed de Sitter spacetime in quantum gravity has proven to be obstructed in most every usual approach. We argue that additional degrees of freedom of the left- and right-movers in string theory and a…
We study cosmologies based on low-energy effective string theory with higher-order string corrections to a tree-level action and with a modulus scalar field (dilaton or compactification modulus). In the presence of such corrections it is…