Paper detail

String windings in the early universe

We study string dynamics in the early universe. Our motivation is the proposal of Brandenberger and Vafa, that string winding modes may play a key role in decompactifying three spatial dimensions. We model the universe as a homogeneous but anisotropic 9-torus filled with a gas of excited strings. We adopt initial conditions which fix the dilaton and the volume of the torus, but otherwise assume all states are equally likely. We study the evolution of the system both analytically and numerically to determine the late-time behavior. We find that, although dynamical evolution can indeed lead to three large spatial dimensions, such an outcome is not statistically favored.