On the superstrings-induced four-dimensional gravity, and its applications to cosmology

We review the status of the fourth-order (quartic in the spacetime curvature) terms induced by superstrings/M-theory (compactified on a warped torus) in the leading order with respect to the Regge slope parameter, and study their (non-perturbative) impact on the evolution of the Hubble scale in the context of the four-dimensional FRW cosmology. After taking into account the quantum ambiguities in the definition of the off-shell superstring effective action, we propose the generalized Friedmann equations, find the existence of their (de Sitter) exact inflationary solutions without a spacetime singularity, and constrain the ambiguities by demanding stability and the scale factor duality invariance of our solutions. The most naive (Bel-Robinson tensor squared) quartic terms are ruled out, thus giving the evidence for the necessity of extra quartic (Ricci tensor-dependent) terms in the off-shell gravitational effective action for superstrings. Our methods are generalizable to the higher orders in the spacetime curvature.Comment: 33 pages, LaTeX, no figures; extensive revision, Sec.6 and references added, stability analysis include

Mutated hybrid inflation in f(R,□R)f(R,{\Box}R)-gravity

A new hybrid inflationary scenario in the context of $f(R,{\Box}R)$-gravity is proposed. Demanding the waterfall field to 'support the potential from below' [unlike the original proposal by Stewart in Phys. Lett. B345, 414 (1995)], we demonstrate that the scalar potential is similar to that of the large-field chaotic inflation model proposed by Linde in Phys. Lett. B129, 177 (1983). Inflationary observables are used to constrain the parameter space of our model; in the process, an interesting limit on the number of e-folds N is found.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, LaTeX2e, v2: Sec.3 expanded and improved, 1 Fig. added, a new result included, some Eqs. corrected, 2 References adde