String Loop Moduli Stabilisation and Cosmology in IIB Flux Compactifications

Abstract

This article represents the author's PhD thesis which is focused on moduli stabilisation in type IIB Calabi-Yau flux compactifications and its applications to cosmology. I derive the topological conditions on an arbitrary Calabi-Yau to give rise to the very promising LARGE Volume Scenario. After a systematic study of the behaviour of string loop corrections for general type IIB compactifications, I show how they play a crucial role to achieve full moduli stabilisation. I then apply these results to cosmology showing how, in the case of K3-fibrations, string loop corrections give rise naturally to an inflationary model which predicts observable gravity waves. Finally I compute the decompactification temperature for the LARGE Volume Scenario due to thermal effects and work out a cosmological constraint on the value of the internal volume.