Talks

Reducing a higher dimensional theory to a 4-dimensional effective theory results in a number of scalar fields describing, for instance, fluctuations of higher dimensional scalar fields (dilaton) or the volume of the compact space (volume modulus). But the fields in the effective theory must be constructed with care: artifacts from the higher dimensions, such as higher dimensional diffeomorphisms and constraint equations, can affect the identification of the degrees of freedom. The effective theory including these effects resembles in many ways cosmological perturbation theory. I will show how constraints and diffeomorphisms generically lead the dilaton and volume modulus to combine into a single degree of freedom in the effective theory, the "breathing mode". This has important implications for models of moduli stabilization and inflation with extra dimensions.

The existence of concentric low variance circles in the CMB sky, generated by black-hole encounters in an aeon preceding our big bang, is a prediction of the Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. Detection of three families of such circles in WMAP data was recently reported by Gurzadyan & Penrose (2010). We reassess the statistical significance of those circles by comparing with Monte Carlo simulations of the CMB sky with realistic modeling of the anisotropic noise in WMAP data. We find that the circles are not anomalous and that all three groups are consistent at 3sigma level with a Gaussian CMB sky as predicted by inflationary cosmology model.