Related papers: Quintessence duality
Dynamical vacuum energy or quintessence, a slowly varying and spatially inhomogeneous component of the energy density with negative pressure, is currently consistent with the observational data. One potential difficulty with the idea of…
The dynamics of a minimally coupled scalar field in the expanding universe is discussed with special reference to phantom cosmology. The evolution of the universe with a phantom field vis-a-vis a quintessence field is compared. Phantom…
It is shown that spatially flat, isotropic cosmologies derived from the Brans--Dicke gravity action exhibit a scale factor duality invariance. This classical duality is then associated with a hidden $N=2$ supersymmetry at the quantum level…
A substantial fraction of the energy density of the universe may consist of quintessence in the form of a slowly-rolling scalar field. Since the energy density of the scalar field generally decreases more slowly than the matter energy…
Good tracking requires that the quintessence energy fraction slowly increase while the roll $\lambda\equiv -d\ln V/\varkappa d\phi$ slowly decreases, but is not yet truly slow-rolling. The supernova bound on the present quintessence…
In string theory it is known that abelian isometries in the sigma model lead to target space duality. We generalize this duality to backgrounds with non--abelian isometries. The procedure we follow consists of gauging the isometries of the…
We review and elaborate on the issue of the dilaton transformation under the usual $r \rightarrow \alpha'/r$ target space duality and its non-static generalization (or $\sigma$-model duality). It is found that the transformation law $r…
It is shown that any spatially flat and isotropic universe undergoing accelerated expansion driven by a self-interacting scalar field can be directly related to a contracting, decelerating cosmology. The duality is made manifest by…
The duality principle, a cornerstone of quantum mechanics, limits the coexistence of wave and particle behaviours of quantum systems. This limitation takes a quantitative form when applied to the visibility $\mathcal V$ and predictability…
We argue that the finiteness of quantum gravity amplitudes in fully compactified theories (at least in supersymmetric cases) leads to a bottom-up prediction for the existence of non-trivial dualities. In particular, finiteness requires the…
Duality symmetries for strings moving in non-trivial spacetime backgrounds are analysed. It is shown that for backgrounds generated from WZW and coset CFT models such duality symmetries are exact to all orders in string perturbation theory.…
It has recently been argued that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua. This would imply that the current accelerated expansion of the universe is not driven by a cosmological constant (or vacuum energy) but by other means such as a…
For states of quantum systems of $N$ particles with harmonic interactions we prove that each reduced density matrix $\rho$ obeys a duality condition. This condition implies duality relations for the eigenvalues $\lambda_k$ of $\rho$ and…
We show that in a large class of two dimensional models with conformal matter fields, the semiclassical cosmological solutions have a weak coupling singularity if the classical matter content is below a certain threshold. This threshold and…
We study the cosmological evolution of scalar fields with arbitrary potentials in the presence of a barotropic fluid (matter or radiation) without making any assumption on which term dominates. We determine what kind of potentials V(phi)…
We review some formal aspects of cosmological solutions in closed string theory with duality symmetric ``matter'' following recent paper with C. Vafa (HUTP-91/A049). We consider two models : when the matter action is the classical action of…
We derive conditions for stable tracker solutions for both quintessence and k-essence in a general cosmological background, H^2 \propto f(\rho). We find that tracker solutions are possible only when \eta = d ln f /d ln \rho is constant,…
An alternative to a cosmological constant is quintessence, defined as a slowly-varying scalar field potential V(\phi). If quintessence is observationally significant, an epoch of inflation is beginning at the present epoch, with \phi the…
We address the fine-tuning problem of dark energy cosmologies which arises when the dark energy density needs to initially lie in a narrow range in order for its present value to be consistent with observations. As recently noticed, this…
In recent work Kachru, Kumar and Silverstein introduced a special class of non-supersymmetric type II string theories in which the cosmological constant vanishes at the first two orders of perturbation theory. Heuristic arguments suggest…