Horava-Witten Cosmology

Abstract

We consider the cosmology of the reduced 5D Horava-Witten M-Theory (HW) with volume modulus and treating matter on the orbifold planes to first order. It is seen that one can recover the FRW cosmology in the Hubble expansion era with relativistic matter, but if a solution exist with non-relativistic (massive) matter it must be non-static with a Hubble constant that depends on the fifth dimension. (The same result holds when 5-branes are present.) This difficulty is traced to the fact that in HW, the volume modulus couples to the bulk and brane cosmological constants (so that the net 4D constant vanishes naturally). This situation is contrasted with the Randall-Sundrum 1 model (which is here treated without making the stiff potential approximation) where the radion field does not couple to the cosmological constants (and so one must instead fine tune the net constant to zero). One finds that non-relativistic matter is accommodated there by changing the distance between the end branes.