Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2013
Abstract
In previous work it was shown that, in accord with the Brandenberger-Vafa mechanism, three is the maximum number of spatial dimensions that can grow large cosmologically from an initial thermal fluctuation. Here we complement that work by considering the possibility of successive fluctuations. Suppose an initial fluctuation causes at least one dimension to grow, and suppose successive fluctuations occur on timescales of order alpha'^{1/2}. If the string coupling is sufficiently large, we show that such fluctuations are likely to push a three-dimensional subspace to large volume where winding modes annihilate. In this setting three is the preferred number of large dimensions. Although encouraging, a more careful study of the dynamics and statistics of fluctuations is needed to assess the likelihood of our assumptions.
Comments
This work was originally published in Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology, available at DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.88.043527