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The early Universe might have undergone phase transitions at energy scales much higher than the one corresponding to the Grand Unified Theories (GUT) scales. At these higher energy scales, the transition at which gravity separated from all…
Recent developments in string theory suggest that cosmic strings could be formed at the end of brane inflation. Supergravity provides a realistic model to study the properties of strings arising in brane inflation. Whilst the properties of…
Axionic cosmic string solutions are investigated in a superstring motivated model with a pseudo-anomalous U(1) gauge symmetry. The inclusion of a gauge field and spatially varying dilaton allow local defect solutions with finite energy per…
I discuss cosmological models either derived from, or inspired by, string theory or M-theory. In particular I discuss solutions in the low-energy effective theory and the role of the dilaton, moduli and antisymmetric form fields in the…
We describe new half-BPS cosmic string solutions in N=2, d=4 supergravity coupled to one vector multiplet and one hypermultiplet. They are closely related to D-term strings in N=1 supergravity. Fields of the N=2 theory that are frozen in…
Within the low-energy effective field theories of QED and gravity, the low-energy speed of light or that of gravitational waves can typically be mildly superluminal in curved spacetimes. Related to this, small scattering time advances…
Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos, and Dvali have proposed that the fundamental gravitational scale is close to 1 TeV, and that the observed weakness of gravity at long distances is explained by the presence of large extra compact dimensions. If…
These lectures from the 1995 Trieste Summer School in High Energy Physics and Cosmology give an elementary introduction to perturbative superstring theory, superstring phenomenology, and the fermionic construction of perturbative string…
D-branes, topological defects in string theory on which string endpoints can live, may give new insight into the understanding of the cosmological evolution of the Universe at early epochs. We analyze the dynamics of D-branes in curved…
A novel mechanism to produce a cosmic network of fundamental superstrings based on a time-varying string tension has been recently proposed. It has been found that fundamental superstrings can grow in a kinating background driven by the…
Large extra dimensions, of size of order of TeV^{-1} ~= 10^{-16} cm, arise naturally in the context of supersymmetry breaking in string theory, while strings at a TeV scale offer a solution to the gauge hierarchy problem, as an alternative…
Amidst all candidates of physics beyond the Standard Model, string theory provides a unique proposal for incorporating gauge and gravitational interactions. In string theory, a four-dimensional theory that unifies quantum mechanics and…
Recent developments in string theory have important implications for cosmology. Topics discussed here are inflation, the cosmological constant, smoothing of cosmological singularities, and dark matter from parallel universes. Talk presented…
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,…
We review various aspects of de Sitter spacetime in string theory: its status as an effective field theory spacetime solution, its relation to the vacuum energy problem in string theory, its (global) holographic definition in terms of two…
We explicitly extract the structure of higher-derivative curvature-squared terms at genus 0 and 1 in the d=4 heterotic string effective action compactified on symmetric orbifolds by computing on-shell S-matrix superstring amplitudes. In…
A string theory in $3$ euclidean spacetime dimensions is found to describe the semiclassical behavior of a certain exact physical state of quantum general relativity in $4$ dimensions. Both the worldsheet and the three dimensional metric…
The string corrections to the Riemann Curvature tensor are found to first order in the string slope parameter, here proportional to $\g$. This is done for D=10 supergravity, the presumed low energy limit of string theory. We follow the…
The recent developments in string theory suggest that the space-time coordinates should be generalized to non-commuting matrices. Postulating this suggestion as the fundamental geometrical principle, we formulate a candidate for covariant…
Cosmic strings are linear concentrations of energy that form whenever phase transitions in the early universe break axial symmetries as originally shown by Kibble. They are the result of frustrated order in the quantum fields responsible…