Stabilizing dilaton and moduli vacua in string and M--Theory cosmology

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how non-trivial form fields in string and M-theory can generate effective potentials that stabilize dilaton and moduli fields, leading to stable vacua in cosmological models.

Contribution

It introduces a mechanism using form fields to stabilize moduli and the dilaton in string and M-theory cosmologies, with explicit examples and solutions.

Findings

Stable minima of the potential can be achieved with specific form field configurations.

The mechanism stabilizes the dilaton in type II string cosmologies.

Moduli stabilization is also demonstrated in certain M-theory solutions.

Abstract

We show how non-trivial form fields can induce an effective potential for the dilaton and metric moduli in compactifications of type II string theory and M-theory. For particular configurations, the potential can have a stable minimum. In cosmological compactifications of type II theories, we demonstrate that, if the metric moduli become fixed, this mechanism can then lead to the stabilization of the dilaton vacuum. Furthermore, we show that for certain cosmological M-theory solutions, non-trivial forms lead to the stabilization of moduli. We present a number of examples, including cosmological solutions with two solitonic forms and examples corresponding to the infinite throat of certain p-branes.