Recent developments in string model-building and cosmology

Abstract

In this talk I discuss recent developments in moduli stabilisation, SUSY breaking and chiral D-brane models together with several interesting features of cosmological models built in the framework of type IIB string compactifications. I show that a non-trivial pre-inflationary dynamics can give rise to a power loss at large angular scales for which there have been mounting observational hints from both WMAP and Planck. I then describe different stringy embeddings of inflationary models which yield large or small tensor modes. I finally argue that reheating is generically driven by the decay of the lightest modulus which can produce, together with Standard Model particles, also non-thermal dark matter and light hidden sector degrees of freedom that behave as dark radiation.

20 pages, invited contribution to the Proceedings of the 14th Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity