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Biomedical subjects

T Damour

Publications and source records attributed to T Damour.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

E10, BE10 and arithmetical chaos in superstring cosmology.

It is shown that the neverending oscillatory behavior of the generic solution, near a cosmological singularity, of the massless bosonic sector of superstring theory can be described as a billiard motion within a simplex in nine-dimensional hyperbolic space. The Coxeter group of reflections of this billiard is discrete and is the Weyl group of the hyperbolic Kac-Moody algebra E10 (for type II) or BE10 (for type I or heterotic), which are both arithmetic. These results lead to a proof of the chaotic ("Anosov") nature of the classical cosmological oscillations, and suggest a "chaotic quantum billiard" scenario of vacuum selection in string theory.

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Gravitational wave bursts from cosmic strings

Cusps of cosmic strings emit strong beams of high-frequency gravitational waves (GW). As a consequence of these beams, the stochastic ensemble of gravitational waves generated by a cosmological network of oscillating loops is strongly non-Gaussian, and includes occasional sharp bursts that stand above the rms GW background. These bursts might be detectable by the planned GW detectors LIGO/VIRGO and LISA for string tensions as small as G&mgr; approximately 10(-13). The GW bursts discussed here might be accompanied by gamma ray bursts.

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Chaos in superstring cosmology

It is shown that the general solution near a spacelike singularity of the Einstein-dilaton- p-form field equations relevant to superstring theories and M theory exhibits an oscillatory behavior of the Belinskii-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz type. String dualities play a significant role in the analysis.

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