English

A Cosmological Mechanism for Stabilizing Moduli

High Energy Physics - Theory 2009-09-15 v2 Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

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 stabilizing the dilaton in a non-perturbative potential induced by gaugino condensates. A well-known difficulty is that the potential is so steep that the dilaton field tends to overrun the correct minimum and to evolve to an observationally unacceptable vacuum. We show that the dilaton coupling to the thermal energy of matter fields produces a natural mechanism for gently relaxing the dilaton field into the correct minimum of the potential without fine-tuning of initial conditions. The same mechanism is potentially relevant for stabilizing other moduli fields.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0001112,
  title  = {A Cosmological Mechanism for Stabilizing Moduli},
  author = {Greg Huey and Paul J. Steinhardt and Burt A. Ovrut and Daniel Waldram},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0001112},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

15 pages, 3 figures, revised discussion

R2 v1 2026-07-22T14:56:18.115Z