Tachyon Defect Formation and Reheating in Brane-Antibrane Inflation

We study analytically the dynamical formation of lower dimensional branes at the endpoint of brane-antibrane inflation through the condensation of topological defects of the tachyon field which describes the instability of the initial state. We then use this information to quantify the efficiency of the reheating which is due to the coupling of time dependent tachyon background to massless gauge fields which will be localized on the final state branes. We improve upon previous estimates indicating that this can be an efficient reheating mechanism for observers on the brane.Comment: 9 pages. Talk given at the 26th annual Montreal-Rochester-Syracuse-Toronto Conference on High-Energy Physics: MRST 200

Tachyon cosmology with non-vanishing minimum potential: a unified model

We investigate the tachyon condensation process in the effective theory with non-vanishing minimum potential and its implications to cosmology. It is shown that the tachyon condensation on an unstable three-brane described by this modified tachyon field theory leads to lower-dimensional branes (defects) forming within a stable three-brane. Thus, in the cosmological background, we can get well-behaved tachyon matter after tachyon inflation, (partially) avoiding difficulties encountered in the original tachyon cosmological models. This feature also implies that the tachyon inflated and reheated universe is followed by a Chaplygin gas dark matter and dark energy universe. Hence, such an unstable three-brane behaves quite like our universe, reproducing the key features of the whole evolutionary history of the universe and providing a unified description of inflaton, dark matter and dark energy in a very simple single-scalar field model.Comment: 18 p

Preheating After Modular Inflation

We study (p)reheating in modular (closed string) inflationary scenarios, with a special emphasis on Kahler moduli/Roulette models. It is usually assumed that reheating in such models occurs through perturbative decays. However, we find that there are very strong non-perturbative preheating decay channels related to the particular shape of the inflaton potential (which is highly nonlinear and has a very steep minimum). Preheating after modular inflation, proceeding through a combination of tachyonic instability and broad-band parametric resonance, is perhaps the most violent example of preheating after inflation known in the literature. Further, we consider the subsequent transfer of energy to the standard model sector in scenarios where the standard model particles are confined to a D7-brane wrapping the inflationary blow-up cycle of the compactification manifold or, more interestingly, a non-inflationary blow up cycle. We explicitly identify the decay channels of the inflaton in these two scenarios. We also consider the case where the inflationary cycle shrinks to the string scale at the end of inflation; here a field theoretical treatment of reheating is insufficient and one must turn instead to a stringy description. We estimate the decay rate of the inflaton and the reheat temperature for various scenarios.Comment: 34 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in JCA

Analysis of scalar perturbations in cosmological models with a non-local scalar field

We develop the cosmological perturbations formalism in models with a single non-local scalar field originating from the string field theory description of the rolling tachyon dynamics. We construct the equation for the energy density perturbations of the non-local scalar field in the presence of the arbitrary potential and formulate the local system of equations for perturbations in the linearized model when both simple and double roots of the characteristic equation are present. We carry out the general analysis related to the curvature and entropy perturbations and consider the most specific example of perturbations when important quantities in the model become complex.Comment: LaTeX, 25 pages, 1 figure, v2: Subsection 3.2 and Section 5 added, references added, accepted for publication in Class. Quant. Grav. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0903.517

Overproduction of cosmic superstrings

We show that the naive application of the Kibble mechanism seriously underestimates the initial density of cosmic superstrings that can be formed during the annihilation of D-branes in the early universe, as in models of brane-antibrane inflation. We study the formation of defects in effective field theories of the string theory tachyon both analytically, by solving the equation of motion of the tachyon field near the core of the defect, and numerically, by evolving the tachyon field on a lattice. We find that defects generically form with correlation lengths of order M_s^{-1} rather than H^{-1}. Hence, defects localized in extra dimensions may be formed at the end of inflation. This implies that brane-antibrane inflation models where inflation is driven by branes which wrap the compact manifold may have problems with overclosure by cosmological relics, such as domain walls and monopoles.Comment: 31 pages, 16 figures, JHEP style; References added; Improved discussion of initial condition

Large Nongaussianity from Nonlocal Inflation

We study the possibility of obtaining large nongaussian signatures in the Cosmic Microwave Background in a general class of single-field nonlocal hill-top inflation models. We estimate the nonlinearity parameter f_{NL} which characterizes nongaussianity in such models and show that large nongaussianity is possible. For the recently proposed p-adic inflation model we find that f_{NL} ~ 120 when the string coupling is order unity. We show that large nongaussianity is also possible in a toy model with an action similar to those which arise in string field theory.Comment: 27 pages, no figures. Added references and some clarifying remark

Reconnection of Non-Abelian Cosmic Strings

Cosmic strings in non-abelian gauge theories naturally gain a spectrum of massless, or light, excitations arising from their embedding in color and flavor space. This opens up the possibility that colliding strings miss each other in the internal space, reducing the probability of reconnection. We study the topology of the non-abelian vortex moduli space to determine the outcome of string collision. Surprisingly we find that the probability of classical reconnection in this system remains unity, with strings passing through each other only for finely tuned initial conditions. We proceed to show how this conclusion can be changed by symmetry breaking effects, or by quantum effects associated to fermionic zero modes, and present examples where the probability of reconnection in a U(N) gauge theory ranges from 1/N for low-energy collisions to one at higher energies.Comment: 25 Pages, 3 Figures. v2: comment added, reference adde

Caustic Formation in Tachyon Effective Field Theories

Certain configurations of D-branes, for example wrong dimensional branes or the brane-antibrane system, are unstable to decay. This instability is described by the appearance of a tachyonic mode in the spectrum of open strings ending on the brane(s). The decay of these unstable systems is described by the rolling of the tachyon field from the unstable maximum to the minimum of its potential. We analytically study the dynamics of the inhomogeneous tachyon field as it rolls towards the true vacuum of the theory in the context of several different tachyon effective actions. We find that the vacuum dynamics of these theories is remarkably similar and in particular we show that in all cases the tachyon field forms caustics where second and higher derivatives of the field blow up. The formation of caustics signals a pathology in the evolution since each of the effective actions considered is not reliable in the vicinity of a caustic. We speculate that the formation of caustics is an artifact of truncating the tachyon action, which should contain all orders of derivatives acting on the field, to a finite number of derivatives. Finally, we consider inhomogeneous solutions in p-adic string theory, a toy model of the bosonic tachyon which contains derivatives of all orders acting on the field. For a large class of initial conditions we conclusively show that the evolution is well behaved in this case. It is unclear if these caustics are a genuine prediction of string theory or not.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in JHEP. Revised derivation of eikonal equation for the DBI action. Added comments concerning the relationship between p-adic string theory and tachyon matter. Added second example of inhomogeneous evolution in p-adic string theory. Misleading statements concerning caustic-free evolution removed, references adde