Attraction to a radiation-like era in early superstring cosmologies

Starting from an initial classical four-dimensional flat background of the heterotic or type II superstrings, we are able to determine at the string one-loop level the quantum corrections to the effective potential due to the spontaneous breaking of supersymmetry by “geometrical fluxes”. Furthermore, considering a gas of strings at finite temperature, the full “effective thermal potential” is determined, giving rise to an effective non-trivial pressure. The backreaction of the quantum and thermal corrections to the space–time metric as well as to the moduli fields induces a cosmological evolution that depends on the early time initial conditions and the number of spontaneously broken supersymmetries. We show that for a whole set of initial conditions, the cosmological solutions converge at late times to two qualitatively different trajectories: They are either attracted to (i) a thermal evolution similar to a radiation dominated cosmology, implemented by a coherent motion of some moduli fields, or to (ii) a “Big Crunch” non-thermal cosmological evolution dominated by the non-thermal part of the effective potential or the moduli kinetic energy. During the attraction to the radiation-like era, periods of accelerated cosmology can occur. However, they do not give rise to enough inflation (e-fold≃0.2e-fold≃0.2) for the models we consider, where N⩾2N⩾2 supersymmetry is spontaneously broken to N=0N=0.