Cosmic String Production Towards the End of Brane Inflation

In these lectures, I review the current status of cosmic strings and cosmic superstrings. I first discuss topological defects in the context of Grand Unified Theories, focusing in particular in cosmic strings arising as gauge theory solitons. I discuss the reconciliation between cosmic strings and cosmological inflation, I review cosmic string dynamics, cosmic string thermodynamics and cosmic string gravity, which leads to a number of interesting observational signatures. I t...

It is possible that superstrings, as well as other one-dimensional branes, could have been produced in the early universe and then expanded to cosmic size today. I discuss the conditions under which this will occur, and the signatures of these strings. Such cosmic superstrings could be the brightest objects visible in gravitational wave astronomy, and might be distinguishable from gauge theory cosmic strings by their network properties.

We reanalyze brane inflation with brane-brane interactions at an angle, which include the special case of brane-anti-brane interaction. If nature is described by a stringy realization of the brane world scenario today (with arbitrary compactification), and if some additional branes were present in the early universe, we find that an inflationary epoch is generically quite natural, ending with a big bang when the last branes collide. In an interesting brane inflationary scenar...

This thesis is dedicated to the study of inflationary scenarios based on string theory. Inflation is a brief period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe which gives natural explanations for problems of the Standard Big Bang Model (SBBM) of cosmology. The phenomenological success of inflation provides the motivation for numerous efforts to establish its connection with particle physics. As a promising contender for a unified theory at very high energy scales, st...

String models can produce successful inflationary scenarios in the context of brane collisions and in many of these models cosmic strings may also be produced. In scenarios such as KKLMMT the string contribution is naturally predicted to be well below the inflationary signal for cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies, in agreement with the existing limits. We find that for $B$ type polarization of CMB the situation is reversed and the dominant signal comes...

An overview is presented of some cosmological aspects of string theory. Recent developments are emphasised, especially the attempts to derive inflation or alternatives to inflation from the dynamics of branes in string theory. Time dependent backgrounds with potential cosmological implications, such as those provided by negative tension branes and S-branes and the rolling string tachyon are also discussed.

Cosmic strings are linear concentrations of energy that may be formed at phase transitions in the very early universe. At one time they were thought to provide a possible origin for the density inhomogeneities from which galaxies eventually develop, though this idea has been ruled out, primarily by observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Fundamental strings are the supposed building blocks of all matter in superstring theory or its modern version, M-theory. The...

At its very beginning, the universe is believed to have grown exponentially in size via the mechanism of inflation. The almost scale-invariant density perturbation spectrum predicted by inflation is strongly supported by cosmological observations, in particular the cosmic microwave background radiation. However, the universe's precise inflationary scenario remains a profound problem for cosmology and for fundamental physics. String theory, the most-studied theory as the final...

A class of well-motivated models of inflation end by producing cosmic strings. The current status of efforts to calculate and observe the signals from such models are outlined, with a particular emphasis on cosmic strings, and on the Cosmic Microwave Background signal.

In this lecture I will review the present status of inflation within string-based brane-world scenarios. The idea is to start from a supersymmetric configuration with two parallel static Dp-branes, and slightly break the supersymmetry conditions to produce a very flat potential for the field that parametrises the distance between the branes, i.e. the inflaton field. This breaking can be achieved in various ways. I will describe one of the simplest examples described in Ref. [...