Aspects of String-Gas Cosmology at Finite Temperature

Abstract

We study string-gas cosmology in dilaton gravity, inspired by the fact that it naturally arises in a string theory context. Our main interest is the thermodynamical treatment of the string-gas and the resulting implications for the cosmology. Within an adiabatic approximation, thermodynamical equilibrium and a small, toroidal universe as initial conditions, we numerically solve the corresponding equations of motions in two different regimes describing the string-gas thermodynamics: (i) the Hagedorn regime, with a single scale factor, and (ii) an almost-radiation dominated regime, which includes the leading corrections due to the lightest Kaluza Klein and winding modes, with two scale factors. The scale factor in the Hagedorn regime exhibits very slow time evolution with nearly constant energy and negligible pressure. By contrast, in case (ii) we find interesting cosmological solutions where the large dimensions continue to expand and the small ones are kept undetectably small.

21 pages, 5 eps figures