Comments on Cosmological Singularities in String Theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates string scattering near cosmological singularities, revealing divergence issues linked to graviton exchange and showing how chiral excitations can mitigate these divergences, with implications for cosmological models.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of divergences in string amplitudes near singularities and explores how chiral excitations can reduce backreaction effects, offering new insights into string behavior in such regimes.

Findings

Divergences in four-point functions are associated with graviton exchange.

Chiral excitations near the singularity avoid divergences and reduce backreaction.

A toy model with rolling tachyon offers intuition on backreaction effects.

Abstract

We compute string scattering amplitudes in an orbifold of Minkowski space by a boost, and show how certain divergences in the four point function are associated with graviton exchange near the singularity. These divergences reflect large tree-level backreaction of the gravitational field. Near the singularity, all excitations behave like massless fields on a 1+1 dimensional cylinder. For excitations that are chiral near the singularity, we show that divergences are avoided and that the backreaction is milder. We discuss the implications of this for some cosmological spacetimes. Finally, in order to gain some intuition about what happens when backreaction is taken into account, we study an open string rolling tachyon background as a toy model that shares some features with R^{1,1}/Z.