Cosmological solutions of supercritical string theory

TL;DR

This paper explores exact cosmological solutions derived from supercritical string theory, revealing conditions for accelerating universes and the role of tachyon condensates in shaping spacetime evolution.

Contribution

It introduces new exact solutions involving closed-string tachyon condensates in supercritical string theory and derives constraints on their couplings in the effective action.

Findings

Existence of exact solutions with tachyon condensates

Constraints on tachyon couplings to the dilaton and metric

Spacetime conformally equivalent to Minkowski space

Abstract

We study quintessence-driven, spatially flat, expanding FRW cosmologies that arise naturally from string theory formulated in a supercritical number of spacetime dimensions. The tree-level potential of the string theory produces an equation of state at the threshold between accelerating and decelerating cosmologies, and the resulting spacetime is globally conformally equivalent to Minkowski space. We demonstrate that exact solutions exist with a condensate of the closed-string tachyon, the simplest of which is a Liouville wall moving at the speed of light. We rely on the existence of this solution to derive constraints on the couplings of the tachyon to the dilaton and metric in the string theory effective action. In particular, we show that the tachyon dependence of the Einstein term must be nontrivial.