Title

String Gas Cosmology

Author(s)/Creator(s)

Scott Watson, Department of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
Thorsten Battefeld, Physics Department, Brown University, Providence, RI

Document Type

Article

Date

2-17-2006

Language

English

Disciplines

Physics

Description/Abstract

We present a critical review and summary of String Gas Cosmology. We include a pedagogical derivation of the effective action starting from string theory, emphasizing the necessary approximations that must be invoked. Working in the effective theory, we demonstrate that at late-times it is not possible to stabilize the extra dimensions by a gas of massive string winding modes. We then consider additional string gases that contain so-called enhanced symmetry states. These string gases are very heavy initially, but drive the moduli to locations that minimize the energy and pressure of the gas. We consider both classical and quantum gas dynamics, where in the former the validity of the theory is questionable and some fine-tuning is required, but in the latter we find a consistent and promising stabilization mechanism that is valid at late-times. In addition, we find that string gases provide a framework to explore dark matter, presenting alternatives to \LambdaCDM as recently considered by Gubser and Peebles. We also discuss quantum trapping with string gases as a method for including dynamics on the string landscape.

Additional Information

55 pages, 1 figure, minor corrections, version to appear in Reviews of Modern Physics More informaton at http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0510022

Recommended Citation

Watson, Scott and Battefeld, Thorsten, "String Gas Cosmology" (2006). Physics - All Scholarship. 414.
https://surface.syr.edu/phy/414

Source

Harvested from Arxiv.org

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.