Related papers: Modular Cosmology
We perform a detailed study of stringy moduli-driven cosmologies between the end of inflation and the commencement of the Hot Big Bang, including both the background and cosmological perturbations: a period that can cover half the lifetime…
Sufficiently large seeds for generating the observed (inter)galactic magnetic fields emerge naturally in string cosmology from the amplification of electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations due to a dynamical dilaton background. The success of…
I present an outline for cosmological evolution in the framework of string theory with emphasis on a phase of dilaton-driven kinetic inflation. It is shown that a typical background of stochastic gravitational radiation is generated, with…
We investigate the possibility of obtaining inflationary solutions of the slow roll type from a low energy Lagrangian coming from superstrings. The advantage of such an approach is that in these theories the scalar potential has only one…
It is possible that the expansion of the universe began with an inflationary phase, in which the inflaton driving the process also was a Higgs field capable of stabilizing magnetic monopoles in a grand-unified gauge theory. If so, then the…
These lectures cover the basics of inflationary models for the early universe, concentrating particularly on the generation of density fluctuations from scalar-field dynamics. The subsequent gravitational dynamics of these fluctuations in…
We consider whether current notions about superstring theory below the Planck scale are compatible with cosmology. We find that the anticipated form for the dilaton interaction creates a serious roadblock for inflation and makes it unlikely…
Moduli fields generically produce strong dark matter -- radiation and baryon -- radiation isocurvature perturbations through their decay if they remain light during inflation. We show that existing upper bounds on the magnitude of such…
I study two-stage hybrid inflation driven by moduli fields, corresponding to flat directions of supersymmetry, lifted by supergravity corrections. The first stage corresponds to a period of either fast-roll or `locked' inflation, induced by…
We study the scalar sector of type IIB superstring theory compactified on Calabi-Yau orientifolds as a place to find a mechanism of inflation in the early universe. In the large volume limit, one can stabilize the moduli in stages using…
We discuss effects of cosmological moduli fields on the cosmic microwave background (CMB). If a modulus field \phi once dominates the universe, the CMB we observe today is from the decay of \phi and its anisotropy is affected by the…
We describe a broad class of multi-field inflationary models with spontaneously broken conformal invariance. It generalizes the recently discovered class of cosmological attractors with a single inflaton field. In the new multi-field…
We study an inflationary scenario where thermal inflation is followed by fast-roll inflation. This is a rather generic possibility based on the effective potentials of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the context of particle physics models.…
A generic feature of the known string inflationary models is that the same physics that makes the inflaton lighter than the Hubble scale during inflation often also makes other scalars this light. These scalars can acquire isocurvature…
In this paper, we show how the generic coupling of moduli to the kinetic energy of ordinary matter fields results in a cosmological mechanism that influences the evolution and stability of moduli. As an example, we reconsider the problem of…
We compute the spectrum of scalar and tensor metric perturbations generated, as amplified vacuum fluctuations, during an epoch of dilaton-driven inflation of the type occurring naturally in string cosmology. In the tensor case the…
Supersymmetry breaking in string theory is expected to occur when moduli fields acquire non-trivial expectation values. In the early universe these fields start out displaced from their final destinations. I present some recent ideas about…
We address the important issue of stabilizing the dilaton in the context of superstring cosmology. Scalar potentials which arise out of gaugino condensates in string models are generally exponential in nature. In a cosmological setting this…
We construct a string-inspired nonsingular cosmological scenario in which an inflaton field is driven up the potential before the graceful exit by employing a low-energy string effective action with an orbifold compactification. This sets…
Low energy effective actions arising from string theory typically contain many scalar fields, some with a very complicated potential and others with no potential at all. The evolution of these scalars is of great interest. Their late time…