Cosmology and String Theory

The expanding Universe and the Big Bang.- Relativistic theory.- The propagation of light and measurements of distance, luminosity, and mass.- Evidence for Dark Matter and the ACDM model.- The Early Universe and its thermal history.- Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and Recombination.- The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) anisotropy.- Problems to be solved by inflation and how they are solved in inflationary models.- Slow-roll inflation.- Reheating and baryogenesis.- Fluctuations in inflation and matching with experimental data.- Extra dimensions and Kaluza-Klein.- Electromagnetism and gravity in various dimensions. Consistent truncation.- N = 1 supergravity in 4 dimensions.- KK compactification of supergravity models.- The relativistic point particle.- Relativistic strings.- Light-cone gauge strings and quantization.- D-branes and gauge fields.- Electromagnetic fields on D-branes and N = 4 SYM. T-duality of closed strings.- T-duality of open strings. M-theory and the duality web.- String theory and particle physics.- Holography and the AdS/CFT correspondence.- Problems of string inflation.- Problems of the supergravity approximation to string inflation.- Brane- (antibrane) inflation.- Braneworld cosmology and the Israel junction conditions.- The KKLT scenario for de Sitter backgrounds in string theory.- The KKLMMT scenario for inflation and generalizations.- The ekpyrotic scenario.- The cyclic and new ekpyrotic scenarios.- String gas cosmology: basics and Brandenberger-Vafa scenario.- String gas and brane gas developments.- Chameleon scalars and string theory.- Axion inflation and axion monodromy from string theory.- Fuzzy dark matter from string theory.- Holographic cosmology.

Horatiu Nastase has a career which has spanned 4 continents. He holds a PhD from SUNY Stony Brook in string theory. During a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, his work with Berenstein and Maldacena started the pp wave correspondence. After another postdoc and Brown University, and a tenure-track at Tokyo Tech in Japan, he is now a tenured Researcher at IFT-UNESP in Brazil.