Related papers: Dynamical Topology Change, Compactification and Wa…
We investigate the dynamics of the geometric transitions associated to compactified spacetimes. By including the dynamics of gravity we are able to follow the evolution of collapsing cycles as they attempt to undergo a topology changing…
Spacetime singularities are studied in both the $D+d$-dimensional string theory and its $D$-dimensional effective theory, obtained by the Kaluza-Klein compactification. It is found that spacetime singularities in the low dimensional…
A brief overview is presented of the progress made during the past few years on the general structure of local models of particle physics from string theory including: moduli stabilisation, supersymmetry breaking, global embedding in…
We study moduli stabilization by thermal effects in the cosmological context. The implementation of finite temperature, which spontaneously breaks supersymmetry, induces an effective potential at one loop level. At the points where extra…
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…
We find de Sitter and flat space solutions with all moduli stabilized in four dimensional supergravity theories derived from the heterotic and type II string theories, and explain how all the previously known obstacles to finding such…
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,…
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 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…
The structure of stringy quantum corrections to four-dimensional effective theories is particularly interesting for string phenomenology and attempts to stabilize moduli. We consider the heterotic string compactified on a Calabi-Yau space.…
The approximate homogeneity of spatial sections of the Universe is well supported observationally, but the inhomogeneity of the spatial sections is even better supported. Here, we consider the implications of inhomogeneity in dust models…
We argue that closed string tachyons drive two spacetime topology changing transitions -- loss of genus in a Riemann surface and separation of a Riemann surface into two components. The tachyons of interest are localized versions of…
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…
It has been pointed out that cosmic string solutions can exist in gauge field theories with broken symmetry even when $\pi _1(G/H)$ is trivial. The stability of such semilocal defects is not guaranteed by topology and depends on dynamical…
We consider a four-fermion theory as a simple model of dynamical symmetry breaking in flat space with non-trivial topology, motivated from recent studies in similar considerations in curved space. The phase structure is investigated, by…
We study the behaviour and consequences of cosmic string networks in contracting universes. They approximately behave during the collapse phase as a radiation fluids. Scaling solutions describing this are derived and tested against…
In string theory, the traditional picture of a Universe that emerges from the inflation of a very small and highly curved space-time patch is a possibility, not a necessity: quite different initial conditions are possible, and not…
Talk given at the ``4th Hellenic School on Elementary Particle Physics", Corfu, 2-20 September 1992: The propagation of strings in cosmological space-time backgrounds is reviewed. We show the relation of a special class of cosmological…
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 fully classify the phenomenology of gravitational wave emission from scaling cosmic string networks with varying tension and compute the spectral indices of the resulting stochastic backgrounds. In string compactifications, periods of…