# Start of new semester, thinking about double field theory cosmology

I haven’t added much to my blog in the past weeks. With university kicking off again, and with Tony and I having our first work sessions of the semester, it has been quite busy. I’ve also been adjusting to being back at university after summer holiday, and with being back on campus for the first time since lock down due to the pandemic. So I’ve been finding my feet again with new daily structure and routine.

I’ve also been working on a number of projects, some short-term and some long-term, which have kept me quite occupied. It is the battle of constantly balancing enticing questions and ideas that define the day. It’s what makes life exciting and keeps me coming back to physics, I suppose.

In the last week or so we’ve been talking more about double field theory cosmology, mainly from the perspective of how matter couples. As a developing area of research there are many interesting questions one can ask. It’s quite interesting stuff, to be honest, and I’m looking forward to potentially pursuing a few side projects in this area. As it relates, I’m interested in higher ${\alpha^{\prime}}$ corrections, non-perturbative solutions, and ${\alpha^{\prime}}$ deformed geometric structures.

To share a bit more, one thing that is quite neat about DFT cosmology is how, under a cosmological ansatz [1,2], the equations coupled to matter take the form

$\displaystyle 4d^{\prime \prime} - 4(d^{\prime})^2 - (D-1)\tilde{H}^2 + 4\ddot{d} - 4 \dot{d}^2 - (D - 1)H^2 = 0$

$\displaystyle (D - 1)\tilde{H}^2 - 2 d^{\prime \prime} - (D - 1)H^2 + 2\ddot{d} = \frac{1}{2}e^{2d} E$

$\displaystyle \tilde{H}^{\prime} - 2\tilde{H}d^{\prime} + \dot{H} - 2h\dot{d} = \frac{1}{2} e^{2d}P. \\ (1)$

Here ${E}$ and ${P}$ denote energy density and pressure, respectively. These equations are duality invariant provided ${E \leftrightarrow -E}$ and ${P \leftrightarrow -P}$. The approaches that make use of these equations are typically restricted to dilaton gravity. That is to say, the B-field is switched off. From what I presently understand the reason for this is because it is generally unknown how proceed with the full massless string sector explicit in the theory.

For a homogeneous and isotropic cosmology the metric takes the form

$\displaystyle dS^2 = -dt^2 + \mathcal{H}_{MN} dx^M dx^N$

$\displaystyle = -dt^2 + a^2(t) dx^2 + a^{-2}(t) d\tilde{x}, \ \ (2)$

where ${t}$ is physical time, ${a(t)}$ is the cosmological scale factor, ${x}$ denote are co-moving spatial coordinates. In general, the basic fields reduce to the cosmological scale factor ${a(t, \tilde{t})}$ and the dilaton ${\phi(t, \tilde{t})}$.

Most pertinently, as we are dealing with a manifestly T-duality invariant theory, what one finds is that T-duality results in scale factor duality. In some ways, this is expected. With the B-field off, the background fields transform

$\displaystyle a(t, \tilde{t}) \rightarrow \frac{1}{a(\tilde{t},t)},$

$\displaystyle \phi(t, \tilde{t}) \rightarrow \phi(\tilde{t}, t). \ \ (3)$

The T-duality invariant combination of the scale factor and the dilaton is

$\displaystyle \phi \equiv \phi - d\ln a, \ \ (4)$

where ${d = D-1}$ is the number of spatial dimensions with D space-time dimensions.

It will be interesting to read more about the work that has so far been done in this area. One thing that is very clear, the approaches to DFT cosmology that I have so far looked at ultimately go back to Tseytlin and Vafa [3], and, also, of course, to efforts in string gas cosmology.

The main thing about these types of approaches behind (1) is that, rather than using T-duality variables, they leverage T-duality frames. The assumption, again, is the use of the section condition (conventional in DFT), which states the fields only depend on a D-dimensional subset of the space-time variables. We’ve talked about this in the past on this blog. There are different, often arbitrary choices, of this condition – what we call frames – and these different frames are related by T-duality.

The most basic example is the supergravity frame with standard coordinates transformed to the winding frame with dual coordinates. And so, what one can do, is calculate supergravity and winding frame solutions of the cosmological equations (1), with these solutions being T-dual to each other [4].

In review of ongoing efforts, it will be interesting to see what ideas might arise in the coming weeks.

References

[1] H. Wu and H. Yang, Double Field Theory Inspired Cosmology. JCAP 1407, 024 (2014) doi:10.1088/1475- 7516/2014/07/024 [arXiv:1307.0159 [hep-th]].

[2] R. Brandenberger, R. Costa, G. Franzmann and A. Welt- man, T-dual cosmological solutions in double field theory. [arXiv:1809.03482 [hep-th]].

[3] A. A. Tseytlin and C. Vafa, Elements of string cosmol- ogy. Nucl. Phys. B 372, 443 (1992) doi:10.1016/0550- 3213(92)90327-8 [hep-th/9109048].

[4] H. Bernardo, R. Brandenberger, G. Franzmann, T-Dual Cosmological Solutions of Double Field Theory II. [ arXiv:1901.01209v1 [hep-th]].