Related papers: The String Dilaton and a Least Coupling Principle
We study the possibility to constrain deviations from Lorentz invariance in dark matter (DM) with cosmological observations. Breaking of Lorentz invariance generically introduces new light gravitational degrees of freedom, which we…
There are at least two serious moduli problems in string cosmology. The first is the possibility that moduli dominate the energy density at the time of nucleosynthesis. The second is that they may not find their minima all together. After…
The standard cosmological model supposes that the dominant matter component changes in the course of the evolution of the universe. We study the homogeneous and isotropic universe with non-zero cosmological constant in the epoch when the…
The dilaton theorem implies that the contribution to the dilaton potential from cubic interactions of all levels must be cancelled by the elementary quartic self-coupling of dilatons. We use this expectation to test the quartic structure of…
`Old' String Theory is a theory of one-dimensional extended objects, whose vibrations correspond to excitations of various target-space field modes including gravity. In these lectures I will give an introduction to low-energy Effective…
We deal with a dynamical mechanism in which a large cosmological constant, as suggested by inflationary scenarios, decays due to expansion of the universe. This mechanism has its origin in the gravitational coupling of the vacuum density.…
The idea that the vacuum energy density $\rho_{\Lambda}$ could be time dependent is a most reasonable one in the expanding Universe; in fact, much more reasonable than just a rigid cosmological constant for the entire cosmic history. Being…
Theories with a non-minimal coupling between the space-time curvature and matter fields introduce an extra force due to the non-conservation of the matter energy momentum. In the present work the theoretical consistency of such couplings is…
Starting from the amplitude with an arbitrary number of massless closed states of the bosonic string, we compute the soft limit when one of the states becomes soft to subsubleading order in the soft momentum expansion, and we show that when…
We discuss the possibility of quantum transitions from the string perturbative vacuum to cosmological configurations characterized by isotropic contraction and decreasing dilaton. When the dilaton potential preserves the sign of the Hubble…
We study nonsingular cosmological scenarios in a general $D$-dimensional string effective action of the dilaton-modulus-axion system in the presence of the matter source. In the standard dilatonic Brans-Dicke parameter ($\omega=-1$) with…
The effects of minimally coupling a gravity to matter on a flat Robertson-Walker geometry are explored. Particular attention is paid to the evolution of the symplectic structure and the Liouville measure it defines. We show that the…
New results are reported from tests of a low-energy effective field theory (EFT) that includes a dilaton field to describe the emergent light scalar with ${ 0^{++} }$ quantum numbers in the strongly coupled near-conformal gauge theory with…
The dipole coupling term between a system of N particles with total charge zero and the electromagnetic field is derived in the presence of a weak gravitational field. It is shown that the form of the coupling remains the same as in flat…
We study the one loop renormalization in the most general metric-dilaton theory with the second derivative terms only. The general theory can be divided into two classes, models of one are equivalent to conformally coupled with gravity…
In this paper, the issue how to introduce matter in Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz theories of gravity is addressed. This is a key point in order to complete the proper definition of these theories and, what is very important, to study their possible…
In the present paper, we revisit gravitational theories which are invariant under TDiffs -- transverse (volume preserving) diffeomorphisms and global scale transformations. It is known that these theories can be rewritten in an equivalent…
We discuss general features of the $\beta$-function equations for spatially flat, $(d+1)$-dimensional cosmological backgrounds at lowest order in the string-loop expansion, but to all orders in $\alpha'$. In the special case of constant…
We discuss the main cosmological implications of considering string-loop effects and a potential for the dilaton in the lowest order string effective action. Our framework is based on the effective model arising from regarding homogeneous…
According to a scenario in string cosmology, a relic background of light dilatons can be a significant component of the dark matter in the Universe. A new approach of searching for such a dilatonic background by observing Earth's surface…