Cosmic Acceleration and M Theory Cosmology

TL;DR

This paper reviews how string and M theory compactifications can produce four-dimensional cosmologies that explain cosmic acceleration and dark energy from fundamental principles.

Contribution

It provides an overview of models derived from string and M theory that yield accelerating cosmologies consistent with observations.

Findings

Models can produce observed cosmic acceleration.

Dark energy scale can be derived from first principles.

Compactifications on curved spaces lead to realistic cosmologies.

Abstract

This is a short overview of spatially flat (or open) four-dimensional accelerating cosmologies for some simple exponential potentials obtained by string or M theory compactification on some non-trivial curved spaces, which may lead to some striking results, e.g., the observed cosmic acceleration and the scale of the dark energy from first principles.