Related papers: String Theory and Inflation
The most important criteria for a successful inflation are to explain the observed temperature anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation, and exiting inflation in a vacuum where it can excite the Standard Model quarks and…
We show that if there is a realistic 4-d string, the dilaton and moduli supermultiplets will generically acquire a small mass O(m_{3/2}), providing the only vacuum-independent evidence of low-energy physics in string theory beyond the…
It is stressed that the kinematical problems of the standard cosmological model can be solved by a phase of accelerated contraction of the cosmic scale factor. Such a behaviour is only a particular case of a more general ``pre-big-bang"…
Thermal inflation was proposed as a mechanism to dilute the density of cosmological moduli. Thermal inflation is driven by a complex scalar field possessing a large vacuum expectation value and a very flat potential, called a `flaton'. Such…
In effective supergravity theories following from the superstring, a modulus field can quite naturally set the neccessary initial conditions for successful cosmological inflation to be driven by a hidden sector scalar field. The leading…
We construct a multi-field inflationary model consisting of multiple K\"ahler moduli derived from type IIB string compactification in the large volume limit. The model consists of both heavy and light fields, with the former being frozen…
In string theory the coupling ``constants'' appearing in the low-energy effective Lagrangian are determined by the vacuum expectation values of some (a priori) massless scalar fields (dilaton, moduli). This naturally leads one to expect a…
String theory gives rise to various mechanisms to generate primordial inflation, of which ``brane inflation'' is one of the most widely considered. In this scenario, inflation takes place while two branes are approaching each other, and the…
The potential during inflation must be very flat in, at least, the direction of the inflaton. In renormalizable global supersymmetry, flat directions are ubiquitous, but they are not preserved in a generic supergravity theory. It is known…
The theory of cosmological perturbations is the main tool which connects theories of the early universe (based on new fundamental physics such as string theory) with cosmological observations. In these lectures, I will provide an…
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 provide a pedagogical overview of inflation in string theory. Our theme is the sensitivity of inflation to Planck-scale physics, which we argue provides both the primary motivation and the central theoretical challenge for the subject.…
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…
This is a short review of string cosmology. We wish to connect string-scale physics as closely as possible to observables accessible to current or near-future experiments. Our possible best hope to do so is a description of inflation in…
In this PhD thesis, we investigate generic features of inflation which are strictly related to fundamental aspects of UV-physics scenarios, such as string theory or supergravity. After a short introduction to standard and inflationary…
The crucial problem of how the dilaton field is stabilized at a phenomenologically acceptable value in string theories remains essentially unsolved. We show that the usual scenario of assuming that the dilaton is fixed by the (SUSY…
These lectures provide an updated pedagogical treatment of the theoretical structure and phenomenology of some basic mechanisms for inflation, along with an overview of the structure of cosmological uplifts of holographic duality. A full…
Generically, string models with $N=1$ supersymmetry are not expected to have moduli beyond perturbation theory; stringy non-perturbative effects as well as low energy field-theoretic phenomena such as gluino condensation will lift any flat…
Inflation with tunneling from a false to a true vacuum becomes viable in the presence of a scalar field that slows down the initial de Sitter phase. As a by-product this field also sets dynamically the value of the Newton constant observed…
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,…