Related papers: Cosmological Quantum String Vacua and String-Strin…
An interpretation of spacelike singularities in string theory uses target space duality to relate the collapsing Schwarzschild geometry near the singularity to an inflationary cosmology in dual variables. An appealing picture thus results…
In spite of its great phenomenological success, current models of scalar field-driven inflation suffer from important unresolved conceptual issues. New fundamental physics will be required to address these questions. String theory is a…
We discuss different formulations and approaches to string theory and $ 2d$ quantum gravity. The generic idea to get a unique description of {\it many} different string vacua altogether is demonstrated on the examples in $ 2d$ conformal,…
We consider new cosmological solutions with a collapsing, an intermediate and an expanding phase. The boundary between the expanding (collapsing) phase and the intermediate phase is seen by comoving observers as a cosmological past (future)…
We review recent progress in string cosmology, where string dualities are applied so as to obtain complete cosmological evolutions, free of any essential singularities. Two classes of models are analyzed. The first class consists of string…
String cosmology aims at providing a reliable description of the very early Universe in the regime where standard-model physics is no longer appropriate, and where we can safely apply the basic ingredients of superstring models such as…
Theories of the cosmological constant fall into two classes, those in which the vacuum energy is fixed by the fundamental theory and those in which it is adjustable in some way. For each class we discuss key challenges. The string theory…
In this talk we discuss the cosmic singularity. We motivate the need to correct general relativity in the study of singularities, and mention the kind of corrections provided by string theory. We review how string theory resolves time-like…
Scale factor duality, a truncated form of time dependent T-duality, is a symmetry of string effective action in cosmological backgrounds interchanging small and large scale factors. The symmetry suggests a cosmological scenario…
The interplay between string theory and cosmology is very promising. Since string theory will yield a quantum theory of space-time and unify all forces of nature, it has the potential of addressing many of the conceptual problems of the…
The theory of cosmological fluctuations assumes that the pre-inflationary state of the universe was the quantum vacuum of a scalar field(s) coupled to gravity. The observed cosmic microwave background fluctuations are then interpreted as…
We argue that in the context of string theory a large number N of connected degenerate vacua that mix will lead to a ground state with much lower energy, essentially because of the standard level repulsion of quantum theory for the…
Progress in string theory has resulted in a whole landscape of vacua solutions.In this talk I describe a proposal for exploring the cosmological implications of the landscape, based on the dynamics of the wavefunction of the universe…
The suggestion that there exist causally disconnected universes or sub-universes to explain the values of physical parameters such as the cosmological constant is discussed. A statistical model of the string landscape/topography is…
We study cosmological implications of the duality ($PSL(2,{\bf Z})$) invariant potential for the compactification radius $T$, arising in a class of superstring vacua. We show that in spite of having only one minimum in the fundamental…
String theory requires two kinds of loop expansion: classical $(\alpha')$ worldsheet loops with expansion parameter $<T>$ where $T$ is a modulus field, and quantum $(\hbar)$ spacetime loops with expansion parameter $<S>$ where $S$ is the…
Cosmic strings provide a radically different paradigm for the formation of structure to the prevailing inflationary one. They afford some extra technical complications: for example, the calculation of the power spectrum of matter and…
Higher-derivative corrections to cosmological effective actions in string theory are largely constrained by T-duality, but have been computed hitherto only to the first few orders in the string scale $\alpha'$. The functional…
We discuss string theory vacua which have the wrong number of spacetime dimensions, and give a crude argument that vacua with more than four large dimensions are improbable. We then turn to two dimensional vacua, which naively appear to…
The cosmological constant is an unexplained until now phenomena of nature that requires an explanation through string effects. The apparent discrepancy between theory and experiment is enourmous and has already been explained several times…