Related papers: String Cosmology: An Update
Cosmology is nowadays going through a true revolution in the quantity and quality of observations that are capable of providing crucial information about the origin and evolution of the universe. In the first years of the next millenium we…
This article reviews recent developments in the study of universes with a positive cosmological constant in string theory.
Cosmological phase transitions are thought to have taken place at the early Universe imprinting their properties on the observable Universe. There is strong evidence that, through the dynamics of a scalar field that lead a second order…
This is a short account, based on a talk given at the 2024 Moriond Cosmology Conference, of where and why string theory matters in early universe cosmology. It is written for a cosmology audience predisposed to be at best sceptical, and at…
We study a cosmological scenario in which inflation is preceded by a bounce. In this scenario, the primordial singularity, one of the major shortcomings of inflation, is replaced by a non-singular bounce, prior to which the universe…
An exploratory study of the cosmology of moduli in string theory. Moduli are argued to be natural inflaton fields and lead to a robust inflationary cosmology in which inflation takes place at the top of domain walls. The amplitude of…
String theory can (in principle) describe gravity at all curvature scales, and can be applied to cosmology to look back in time beyond the Planck epoch. The duality symmetries of string theory suggest a cosmological picture in which the…
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,…
The evolution of the universe started from a hot and dense Big Bang point. Temperature fluctuation map of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation and initial seeds of large scale structures (LSS) are explained by an inflationary period…
Inflationary cosmology has provided a predictive and phenomenologically very successful scenario for early universe cosmology. Attempts to implement inflation using scalar fields, however, lead to models with serious conceptual problems. I…
Over the past three years we have determined the basic features of our Universe. It is spatially flat; accelerating; comprised of 1/3 a new form of matter, 2/3 a new form of energy, with some ordinary matter and a dash of massive neutrinos;…
We present a new approach to early universe cosmology. Inflation is replaced by a phase transition in which both matter and geometry are created simultaneously. We calculate the spectrum of metric perturbations and show that it is flat. We…
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…
The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…
Several scenarios have been proposed in which primordial perturbations could originate from quantum vacuum fluctuations in a phase corresponding to a collapse phase (in an Einstein frame) preceding the Big Bang. I briefly review three…
We investigate the properties of a cosmological scenario which undergoes a gravitational phase transition at late times. In this scenario, the Universe evolves according to general relativity in the standard, hot Big Bang picture until a…
Loop quantum cosmology provides an efficient framework to study the evolution of the Universe beyond the classical Big Bang paradigm. Because of holonomy corrections, the singularity is replaced by a "bounce". The dynamics of the background…
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…
We consider the propagation of classical and quantum strings on cosmological space-times which interpolate from a collapsing phase to an expanding phase. We begin by considering the classical propagation of strings on space-times with…
I present two examples in which the curvature singularity of a radiation-dominated Universe is regularized by (a) the repulsive effects of spin interactions, and (b) the repulsive effects arising from a breaking of the local gravitational…