Particle theory

Abstract:

Precision measurements of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and of the clustering of largescale structure have supposedly confirmed that the primordial density perturbation has a (nearly) scale-invariant spectrum. However this conclusion is based on assumptions about the world model and the nature of the dark matter. Physical models of inflation suggest that the spectrum may not in fact be scale-free, which would imply rather different cosmological parameters on the basis of the same observational data.

Abstract:

We study the effective D=4, N=1 supergravity description of five-dimensional heterotic M theory in the presence of an M5 brane, and derive the Killing vectors and isometry group for the Kähler moduli-space metric. The group is found to be a non-semi-simple maximal parabolic subgroup of Sp(4,R), containing a nontrivial SL(2,R) factor. The underlying moduli space is then naturally realized as the group space Sp(4,R)/U(2), but equipped with a nonhomogeneous metric that is invariant only under that maximal parabolic group. This nonhomogeneous metric space can also be derived via field truncations and identifications performed on Sp(8,R)/U(4) with its standard homogeneous metric. In a companion paper we use these symmetries to derive new cosmological solutions from known ones. © 2005 The American Physical Society.

Abstract:

We study the hydrodynamics of the high-energy phase of Little String Theory. The poles of the retarded two-point function of the stress energy tensor contain information about the speed of sound and the kinetic coefficients, such as shear and bulk viscosity. We compute this two-point function in the dual string theory and analytically continue it to lorentzian signature. We perform an independent check of our results by the lorentzian supergravity calculation in the background of non-extremal NS5-branes. The speed of sound vanishes at the Hagedorn temperature. The ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density is equal to the universal value 1/4π and does not receive α′ corrections. The ratio of bulk viscosity to entropy density equals 1/10π. We also compute the R-charge diffusion constant. In addition to the hydrodynamic singularities, the correlators have an infinite series of finite-gap poles, and a massless pole with zero attenuation. © SISSA 2005.