Accelerating Cosmologies and Inflation from M/Superstring Theories

Abstract

We review the recent developments in obtaining accelerating cosmologies and/or inflation from higher-dimensional gravitational theories, in particular superstring theories in ten dimensions and M-theory in eleven dimensions. We first discuss why it is difficult to obtain inflationary behavior in the effective low-energy theories of superstring/M-theory, i. e. supergravity theories. We then summarize interesting solutions including S-branes that give rise to accelerating cosmologies and inflationary solutions in M-theory with higher order corrections. Other approaches to inflation in the string context are also briefly discussed.