Cosmic String Production Towards the End of Brane Inflation

In the context of colliding brane worlds I discuss a toy cosmological model, developed in collaboration with E. Gravanis, which arguably produces inflation and a relaxing to zero cosmological ``constant'' hierarchically small as compared to the supersymmetry breaking (TeV) scale. Supersymmetry breaking is induced by compactification of the brane worlds on magnetized tori. The crucial ingredient is the non-criticality (non conformality) of string theory on the observable brane...

In these lectures I review recent attempts to apply string theory to cosmology, including string cosmology and various models of brane cosmology. In addition, the review includes an introduction to inflation as well as a discussion of transplanckian signatures. I also provide a critical discussion of the possible role of holography. The material is based on lectures given in January 2004 at the RTN String School in Barcelona, but also contain some additional material.

We describe string production after angled brane inflation. First, we point out that there was a discrepancy in previous discussions. The expected tension of the cosmic string calculated from the four-dimensional effective Lagrangian did not match the one obtained in the brane analysis. In the previous analysis, the cosmic string is assumed to correspond to the lower-dimensional daughter brane, which wraps the same compactified space as the original mother brane. In this case...

The predictions of the inflationary LCDM paradigm match today's high-precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy extremely well. The same data put tight limits on other sources of anisotropy. Cosmic strings are a particularly interesting alternate source to constrain. Strings are topological defects, remnants of inflationary-era physics that persist after the big bang. They are formed in a variety of models of inflation, including string theory models...

Cosmic strings of the GUT scale, generically formed during the SSB of supersymmetric hybrid inflation, are compatible with the most recent CMB data. The strong constraints on the allowed cosmic strings contribution to the measured temperature anisotropies impose limits on the free parameters of the inflationary models, namely the mass scales and the couplings.

Over the past decade it has become clear that fundamental strings are not the only fundamental degrees of freedom in string theory. D-branes are also part of the spectrum of fundamental states. In this paper we explore some possible effects of D-branes on early Universe string cosmology, starting with two key assumptions: firstly that the initial state of the Universe corresponded to a dense, hot gas in which all degrees of freedom were in thermal equilibrium, and secondly th...

Cosmic strings are one-dimensional topological defects which could have been formed in the early stages of our Universe. They triggered a lot of interest, mainly for their cosmological implications: they could offer an alternative to inflation for the generation of density perturbations. It was shown however that cosmic strings lead to inconsistencies with the measurements of the cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies. The picture is changed recently. It was sho...

In this work we study the imprints of a primordial cosmic string on inflationary power spectrum. Cosmic string induces two distinct contributions on curvature perturbations power spectrum. The first type of correction respects the translation invariance while violating isotropy. This generates quadrupolar statistical anisotropy in CMB maps which is constrained by the Planck data. The second contribution breaks both homogeneity and isotropy, generating a dipolar power asymmetr...

The cosmic string is a useful probe of the early Universe and may give us a clue to physics at high energy scales where any artificial particle accelerators cannot reach. Although one of the most promising tools is the cosmic microwave background, the constraint from gravitational waves is becoming so stringent that one may not hope to detect its signatures in the cosmic microwave background. In this paper, we construct a scenario that contains cosmic strings observable in th...

In the present work we discuss inflation, dark matter and cosmological evolution in the context of the brane-world scenario. Being string theory inspired, the brane-world models provide corrections to the General Relativity, which is considered to be the low-energy limit of string theory. We find that novel cosmologies are obtained, which potentially can provide answers to some of the longstanding problems of modern cosmology, such as the origin and nature of dark energy. At ...