Infrared hierarchy, thermal brane inflation and superstrings as superheavy dark matter

In theories with TeV scale quantum gravity the standard model particles live on a brane propagating in large extra dimensions. Branes may be stabilized at large (sub-millimeter) distances from each other, either due to weak Van der Waals type interactions, or due to an infrared analog of Witten's inverse hierarchy scenario. In particular, this infrared stabilization may be responsible for a large size of extra dimensions. In either case, thermal effects can drive a brief period of the late inflation necessary to avoid the problems with high reheating temperature and the stable unwanted relies. The main reason is that the branes which repel each other at zero temperature can be temporarily glued together by thermal effects. It is crucial that the temperature needed to stabilize branes on top of each other can be much smaller than the potential energy of the bound-state, which drives inflation. After 10-15 e-foldings bound-states cool below the critical temperature and decay ending inflation. The parallel brane worlds get separated at this stage and superstrings (of a sub-millimeter size) get stretched between them. These strings can have the right density in order to serve as a superheavy dark matter. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.