Cosmological Moduli and the Post-Inflationary Universe: A Critical Review

By G. Kane, Kanu Sinha, S. Watson. 2015

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We critically review the role of cosmological moduli in determining the post-inflationary history of the universe. Moduli are ubiquitous in string and M-theory constructions of beyond the Standard Model physics, where they parametrize the geometry of the compactification manifold. For those with masses determined by supersymmetry breaking this leads to their eventual decay slightly before Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (without spoiling its predictions). This results in a matter dominated phase shortly after inflation ends, which can influence baryon and dark matter genesis, as well as observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background and the growth of large-scale structure. Given progress within fundamental theory, and guidance from dark matter and collider experiments, non-thermal histories have emerged as a robust and theoretically well-motivated alternative to a strictly thermal one. We review this approach to the early universe and discuss both the theoretical challenges and the observational implications.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5377d3c03f0a2ad4582837f0947e4a4549f7de98

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Berlin
2. Miguel Escudero
3. Meng-Xiang Lin
4. Daniel Vagie
5. D. Hooper
6. Huai-Ke Guo
7. Kanu Sinha
8. G. White

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. A. Berlin
2. Miguel Escudero
3. Meng-Xiang Lin
4. D. Hooper
5. Kanu Sinha
6. G. White
7. Miguel Escudero Abenza
8. Christoph Weniger

Citations in the corpus

• Toward (finally!) ruling out Z and Higgs mediated dark matter models (2016, background): “Examples of such scenarios include those in which the abundance of dark matter is depleted as a result of an out-of-equilibrium decay [52–58] or a period of late-time inflation [59–63].”
• Phase transitions in an expanding universe: stochastic gravitational waves in standard and non-standard histories (2020, background): “This is important, since growing evidence suggests that the standard assumption of radiation domination prior to Big Bang Nucleosynthesis may be too naive [56, 57].”