Related papers: Relaxing the Cosmological Moduli Problem
Many models of supersymmetry breaking involve particles with weak scale mass and Planck mass suppressed couplings. Coherent production of such particles in the early universe destroys the successful predictions of nucleosynthesis. We show…
We investigate the cosmological moduli problem by studying a modulus decay in detail and find that the branching ratio of the gravitino production is generically of O(0.01-1), which causes another cosmological disaster. Consequently, the…
Moduli potential loses its minima due to external energy sources of inflaton energy density or radiation produced at the end of inflation. But, the non-existence of minima does not necessarily mean destabilization of moduli. In fact, the…
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…
One proposed solution of the moduli problem of string cosmology requires that the moduli are quite heavy, their decays reheating the universe to temperatures above the scale of nucleosynthesis. In many of these scenarios, the moduli are…
We investigate moduli field dynamics in supergravity/M-theory like set ups where we turn on fluxes along some or all of the extra dimensions. As has been argued in the context of string theory, we observe that the fluxes tend to stabilize…
There are now two cosmological constant problems: (i) why the vacuum energy is so small and (ii) why it comes to dominate at about the epoch of galaxy formation. Anthropic selection appears to be the only approach that can naturally resolve…
We consider a (1+1) dimensional scalar field theory that supports oscillons, which are localized, oscillatory, stable solutions to nonlinear equations of motion. We study this theory in an expanding background and show that oscillons now…
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,…
A generic class of string theories predicts the existence of light moduli fields, and they are expected to have masses $m_\phi$ comparable to the gravitino mass $m_{3/2}$ which is in a range of $10^{-2}$keV--1GeV in gauge-mediated…
Cosmological constraints on moduli, whose coupling to matter is stronger than Planck mass suppressed coupling, are derived. In particular, moduli are considered to be produced by oscillating loops of cosmic strings and constraints are…
In supersymmetric theories a field can develop a vacuum expectation value $M \gg 10^3\,{\rm GeV}$, even though its mass $m$ is of order $10^2$ to $10^3\,{\rm GeV}$. The finite temperature in the early Universe can hold such a field at zero,…
We argue that primordial black holes in the early universe can provide an efficient resolution of the Brustein-Steinhardt moduli overshoot problem in string cosmology. When the universe is created near the Planck scale, all the available…
Recently, there have been claims in the literature that the cosmological constant problem can be dynamically solved by specific compactifications of gravity from higher-dimensional toy models. These models have the novel feature that in the…
We investigate effects of the radiation and the moduli oscillation around the stabilized values on the evolution of a 6-dimensional spacetime compactified on $S^2$. In order to see the transition from the 5-dimensional space to the…
The cosmological constant problem is studied in a two component cosmological model. The universe contains a cosmological constant of an arbitrary size and sign and an additional component with an inhomogeneous equation of state. It is shown…
At momenta much higher than the Hubble scale, the cosmological expansion can be thought of as a weak gravitational field. We consider QFT in a particularly convenient set of coordinates that makes this manifest, so that, for those high…
We critically review the role of cosmological moduli in determining the post-inflationary history of the universe. Moduli are ubiquitous in string and M-theory constructions of beyond the Standard Model physics, where they parametrize the…
Cosmological moduli generically come to dominate the energy density of the early universe, and thereby trigger an early matter dominated era. Such non-standard cosmological histories are expected to have profound effects on the evolution…
In string/M-theory with a large compactification radius, some axion-like moduli can be much lighter than the gravitino. Generic moduli in gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking models also have a mass far below the weak scale. Motivated by…