String Variations on Kaluza-Klein Cosmology

Abstract

We study the cosmological solutions of the two-dimensional Brans-Dicke equations considering a gas of $c=1$ strings in $S^{1}\times \mbox{\bf R}$ as the source of the gravitational field. We also study the implications of the $R$-duality invariance on the solutions. To this purpose we conjecture that, as it happens for massless fields in finite boxes, the free energy of a gas of massless string excitations is not given by the corresponding toroidal compactification.