Jian-Huang She

We propose that the existence of the string landscape suggests the universe can be in a quantum glass state, where an extremely large viscosity is generated, and long distance dynamics slows down. At the same time, the short distance dynamics is not altered due to the separation of time scales. This scenario can help to understand some controversies in cosmology, for example the natural existence of slow roll inflation and dark energy in the landscape, the apparent smallness of the cosmological constant. We see also that moduli stabilization is no longer necessary. We further identify the glass transition point, where the viscosity diverges, as the location of the cosmic horizon. We try to reconstruct the geometry of the accelerating universe from the structure of the landscape, and find that the metric should have an infinite jump when crossing the horizon. We predict that the static coordinate metric for dS space breaks down outside the horizon.

WMAP three-year data favors a red power spectrum at the level of 2 standard deviations, which provides a stringent constraint on the inflation models. In this note we use this data to constrain brane inflation models and find that KKLMMT model can not fit WMAP+SDSS data at the level of 1 standard deviation and a fine-tuning, eight parts in thousand at least, is needed at the level of 2 standard deviation.

We use D-instantons to probe the geometry of Misner universe, and calculate the world volume field theory action, which is of the 1+0 dimensional form and highly non-local. Turning on closed string tachyons, we see from the deformed moduli space of the D-instantons that the spacelike singularity is removed and the region near the singularity becomes a fuzzy cone, where space and time do not commute. When realized cosmologically there can be controllable trans-planckian effects. And the infinite past is now causally connected with the infinite future, thus also providing a model for big crunch/big bang transition. In the spirit of IKKT matrix theory, we propose that the D-instanton action here provides a holographic description for Misner universe and time is generated dynamically. In addition we show that winding string production from the vacua and instability of D-branes have simple uniform interpretations in this second quantized formalism.

We calculate the semi-inclusive decay rate of an average string state with compactification both in the bosonic string theory and in the superstring theory. We also apply this calculation to a brane-inflation model in a warped geometry and find that the decay rate is greatly suppressed if final strings are all massive and enhanced with one final string massless, which may pose a challenge to this class of models.