Cosmological moduli dynamics

Low energy effective actions arising from string theory typically containmany scalar fields, some with a very complicated potential and others with nopotential at all. The evolution of these scalars is of great interest. Theirlate time values have a direct impact on low energy observables, while theirearly universe dynamics can potentially source inflation or adversely affectbig bang nucleosynthesis. Recently, classical and quantum methods for fixingthe values of these scalars have been introduced. The purpose of this work isto explore moduli dynamics in light of these stabilization mechanisms. Inparticular, we explore a truncated low energy effective action that models theneighborhood of special points (or more generally loci) in moduli space, suchas conifold points, where extra massless degrees of freedom arise. We find thatthe dynamics has a surprisingly rich structure - including the appearance ofchaos - and we find a viable mechanism for trapping some of the moduli.Comment: 35 pages, 14 figures, references adde