A Cosmological Mechanism for Stabilizing Moduli

TL;DR

This paper proposes a cosmological mechanism where moduli coupling to matter's kinetic energy helps stabilize these fields, specifically demonstrating how it can gently relax the dilaton into a suitable minimum without fine-tuning.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cosmological stabilization mechanism for moduli fields via their coupling to matter's kinetic energy, addressing the steep potential problem.

Findings

Dilaton coupling to thermal energy aids in stabilization.

Mechanism works without fine-tuning initial conditions.

Potentially applicable to other moduli fields.

Abstract

In this paper, we show how the generic coupling of moduli to the kinetic energy of ordinary matter fields results in a cosmological mechanism that influences the evolution and stability of moduli. As an example, we reconsider the problem of stabilizing the dilaton in a non-perturbative potential induced by gaugino condensates. A well-known difficulty is that the potential is so steep that the dilaton field tends to overrun the correct minimum and to evolve to an observationally unacceptable vacuum. We show that the dilaton coupling to the thermal energy of matter fields produces a natural mechanism for gently relaxing the dilaton field into the correct minimum of the potential without fine-tuning of initial conditions. The same mechanism is potentially relevant for stabilizing other moduli fields.