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17/05/2017 StringCosmologyDepartmentofPhysicsandAstronomyUppsalaUniversity,Sweden

String Cosmology and Flux Compactifications

GROUP MEMBERS
Faculty: Ulf Danielsson,Giuseppe Dibitetto
Post.Doc. Fellows: Andrei Constantin,Magdalena Larfors
Ph.D. Students: Sergio Vargas Avila,Suvendu Giri

STRING COSMOLOGY
Right before the turn of the millenium some cosmological observations have revealed that
our universe contains dark energy. This source of energy/matter in the universe satises an
anomalous equation of state with respect to ordinary matter or radiation and it corresponds
to the vacuum energy present in our universe. Dark energy can be accommodated inside
General Relativity by including an extra term to the Einstein equations which is often called
cosmological constant and normally denoted by . Combined measurements coming from
supernovae [1, 2], the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation [3,4] and the
Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) [5, 6] concluded that we live in a universe with
positive and small cosmological constant and gave rise to what we call nowadays the
concordance model of cosmology. The energy/matter content giving the best t is depicted
ingure 1.

Figure 1: The concordance model of cosmology predicts that our universe has a positive
cosmological constant. In a recent phase of the history of the universe the vacuum energy
took over and became the dominant energy content.

The cosmological constant drives an accelerated expansion of the universe which is described
by de Sitter spacetime. This suggests that, after dark energy started to dominate, our
universe started approaching a de Sitter vacuum rather than a Minkowski one. This implies
that the suitable string compactications for phenomenological purposes should give rise to
de Sitter vacua. One can show that plain Calabi-Yau compactications present the
unfortunate feature of producing a large amount of massless scalar elds (a.k.a. moduli).
Hence, in order to reproduce de Sitter vacua, one should go beyond these well-known
compactications.

An extra motivation for considering accelerated expanding universes in string theory is that
of embedding inationary modelswithin string theory. Ination describes a phase of
accelerated expansion of the universe right after the big bang. This was proposed to explain
an almost perfect homogeneity and isotropy relating regions in the sky which had never been
in causal contact with each other throughout the history.Inationary models are described
by a quasi-de Sitter phase driven by a scalar eld called the inaton.

The above issues provide two challenges for string theory compactications related to de
Sitter. The rst one is nding de Sitter vacua in order to describe the late-time accelerating
phase we are approaching now. The second one is embedding ination in string theory by
providing examples of compactications in which quasi-de Sitter phases are possible with a
very at potential for the inaton. These approaches in string theory result in what is often
called string cosmologyand they have been extensively followed in several directions in the
last decade.

Concentrating for a moment on ination, it is a particularly striking fact that string theory
suggests some preferred classes of inationary models, in which, for instance, no detectable
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tensor modes are present in the spectrum of cosmological perturbations of the early universe.
17/05/2017 StringCosmologyDepartmentofPhysicsandAstronomyUppsalaUniversity,Sweden
This information, which is encoded in the CMB, can still be detected now, and is the result
of frozen quantum uctuations grown to observable size in the present universe. Precision
measurements on the CMB carried out in the last decade by WMAP [7-9] already provided
very precious data, although the existence of tensor perturbations still remains an open
question. There is a possibility that the PLANCK satellite, which is currently collecting data,
might tell us more about this. Such an experimental input would be a valuable opportunity
for constraining models of ination, among which there are stringy inationary proposals.

Coming now back to the search for de Sitter vacua in string theory, right after the
experimental detection of the cosmological constant, the existence of a huge "zoo"of vacua
[10,11] (about 10500!!) was conjectured on the basis of statistical analysis. This enormous
amount of different string vacua is often referred to as the landscape(see what sketched in
gure 2).However, there has been more recently a lot of debate on this after the many failed
attempts of nding classical (i.e.at tree level) de Sitter solutions from string theory
compactications.

Figure 2: The shape and size of the extra dimensions in String Theory are treated as scalar
excitations that become massive when sitting at local minima of a scalar potential.

Going beyond the search for classical solutions in string theory, people have considered the
possibility of stabilising the moduli in an anti-de Sitter vacuum by means of quantum non-
perturbative effects [12] and subsequently providing an uplifting to de Sitter by means of
several mechanisms. In ref. [12] such an uplifting was provided by additional extended
sources breaking supersymmetry explicitly.Nevertheless, this mechanism completely ignores
the backreaction of such sources and some recent analyses indicate that it might cause the
arising of a singularity and possibly related instabilities.In ref. [13] the possibility of D-term
uplifting was considered. However, later in refs [14, 15] the inconsistency of this
construction was pointed out due to the violation of gauge invariance occurring in a
supergravity model with D-terms and yet vanishing F-terms. In ref. [16] a valid proposal is
given to overcome this inconsistency. The third possible type of uplifting mechanism is F-
term uplifting, which was worked out e.g.in ref. [17].

The current state of the art concerning models of ination within String Theory compatible
with PLANCK data is discussed in ref. [18].

FLUX COMPACTIFICATIONS
String Theory is a 10D formulation of unied interactions. Given this, it is very interesting to
study its backgrounds with four large dimensions and six compact ones.In order to obatin
maximally symmetric solutions other than the trivial Minkowski one, we need to use gauge
uxes, curvature and branes in order to stabilise the scalar excitations encoding the
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17/05/2017 StringCosmologyDepartmentofPhysicsandAstronomyUppsalaUniversity,Sweden
geometric informationabout the internal manifold. See e.g.the situation depicted in gure
3.

Figure 3: An example of an internal manifold with non-trivial geometry and topology, where
gauge uxes and branes can wrap cycles of the internal manifold.

This is what could be referred to as a top-downapproach, which has the advantage of being
explicit and constructive, but it is limited to the supergravity regime, where calculations are
underpertubative control.A parallel but somehow related research line has regarded
supergravity models as lower-dimensional effective descriptions coming from ux
compactications. In this way, one can hope of capturingsome extra information concerning
string dualities (see gure 4) and strong-coupling effects which are missed out by the 10D
supergravity approximation.

Figure 4: The chain of dualities that relate all the different formulations of string theory
amongst them. Each of them taken in its natural perturbative regime may be seen as a
different pertubativecorner of a more fundamental 11D theory called M-theory.

In this context a lot of work has been donein the case of ux backgrounds preserving
minimal supersymmetry in four dimensions. Some work has been done also in the context of
compactications preserving larger amount of supersymmetry.A very welcome ingredient
(or even crucial in the case of (half-)maximal supergravities) for obtaining de Sitter solutions
turns out to be given by generalised uxes[19].These objects appear as deformation
parameters in the lower-dimensional effective description even though they do not have a
clear higher-dimensional interpretation.Their appearance was rst conjectured in ref. [20]
based on duality covariance arguments.

In the context of extended supergravities (N=4 or N=8), generalised uxescan be

interpreted as gaugings. Such deformations in extended supergravities are classied and
comprisedin a universal duality-covariant formulation making use of the so-called
embedding tensor formalism[21, 22]. Studying such more constrained situations might shed
alight upon the role of string dualities in ux compactications, with the nal goal of
learning something about strong-coupling effects in the top-downapproach.

For a nice review of Flux Compactications and its relation to gauged supergravities, we
respectively advise refs.[23, 24].

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