Related papers: Graviton production from D-string recombination an…
We study the embedding of cosmic strings, related to the Abrikosov-Nielsen-Olesen vortex solution, into d=4, N=1 supergravity. We find that the local cosmic string solution which saturates the BPS bound of supergravity with $D$-term…
An inflationary stage dominated by a $D$-term avoids the slow-roll problem of inflation in supergravity and may emerge in theories with a non-anomalous or anomalous U(1) gauge symmetry. The most intriguing and commonly invoked possibility…
Effects of the unstable gravitino on the big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and its implications to particle cosmology are discussed. If the gravitino mass is smaller than \sim 20 TeV, lifetime of the gravitino becomes longer than \sim 1sec and…
In this thesis, consisting of two main parts, we study observational signatures of cosmic (super)strings in the context of D-brane inflation and properties of scalar perturbations on generic homogeneous inflating backgrounds. In the first…
We study the scattering of a massless and neutral test particle in the gravitational field of a body (the string star) made of a large number of scalar states of the superstring. We consider two cases, the one in which these states are…
I argue that string creation may have played a role in reheating the universe after inflation. For strings in four dimensions that arise from branes wrapping cycles in the extra dimensions, estimates from effective field theory show that…
We analyze theoretical constraints on the consistency of brane inflation leading to cosmic superstring formation and on the subsequent radiation of these cosmic superstrings. We first investigate the implications of recently elucidated…
The production and the final abundance of gravitino dark matter appear to depend crucially on the restoration of the global U(1) $R$-symmetry of GMSB sectors in a threefold way. An $R$-symmetric phase effectively suppresses the production…
Assuming axions are potential dark matter (DM) candidate that make up all of the DM abundance, we discuss production of axions via (i) standard misalignment mechanism during the period of reheating and (ii) graviton-mediated 2-to-2…
We consider the 3+1 visible sector to live on a Hanany-Witten D-brane construction in type IIA string theory. The messenger sector consists of stretched strings from the visible brane to a hidden D6-brane in the extra spatial dimensions. In…
Gravitational particle production in the context of braneworlds is considered from a phenomenological point of view. The production of KK modes for bulk fields is discussed and their abundances computed. The results have been applied to…
We calculate the density and gravitational wave spectrums generated in a version of string cosmology termed pre-big bang scenario. The large scale structures are originated from quantum fluctuations of the metric and dilaton field during a…
Since the first detection of gravitational waves by ground-based interferometers, it has emerged as a novel probe for exploring physics in the early universe. The particle nature of cold dark matter (DM) and its underlying production…
Monopole-antimonopole pairs connected by strings can be formed as topological defects in a sequence of cosmological phase transitions. Such hybrid defects typically decay early in the history of the universe but can still generate an…
Moduli fields are generally present in superstring--inspired models. They are typically characterized by masses of the order of the supersymmetry breaking scale and by interactions of gravitational strength to ordinary matter. If stable,…
We propose to uncover the signature of a stringy era in the primordial Universe by searching for a prominent peak in the relic graviton spectrum. This feature, which in our specific model terminates an $\omega^3$ increase and initiates an…
Breaking a global or local $U(1)_{\rm B-L}$ symmetry at high scales simultaneously generates Majorana masses for heavy right-handed neutrinos and produces a network of cosmic strings. The evolution and decay of these strings source a…
We consider the low energy phenomenology of superstrings. In particular we analyse supersymmetry breaking via gaugino condensate and we compare the phenomenology of the two different approaches to stabilize the dilaton field. We study the…
The four-dimensional superstring solutions define at low energy effective supergravity theories. A class of them extends successfully the validity of the standard model up to the string scale (${\cal O}(10^{17})~TeV$). We stress the…
In the early Universe, as a consequence of $U(1)_{B-L}$ gauge symmetry-breaking, the so-called $B-L$ cosmic strings are expected to be produced at the breaking scale $\eta_{B-L}$ according to the Kibble mechanism. The decaying, collapsing…