We investigate in some quantitative details the viability of reheating in multi-throat brane inflationary scenarios by estimating and comparing the time scales for the various processes involved. We also calculate within perturbative string theory the decay rate of excited closed strings into KK modes and compare with that of their decay into gravitons; we find that in the inflationary throat the former is preferred. We also find that over a small but reasonable range of parameters of the background geometry, these KK modes will preferably tunnel to another throat (possibly containing the Standard Model) instead of decaying to gravitons due largely to their suppressed coupling to the bulk gravitons. Once tunneled, the same suppressed coupling to the gravitons again allows them to reheat the Standard Model efficiently. We also consider the effects of adding more throats to the system and find that for extra throats with small warping, reheating still seems viable.

We find a one-parameter family of long-lived physical string states in type II superstring theory. We compute the decay rate by an exact numerical evaluation of the imaginary part of the one-loop propagator. Remarkably, the lifetime rapidly increases with the mass. We find a power-law dependence of the form T ∼ = const.g −2 s (mass) α , where the value of α depends on the parameter characterizing the state. For the most stable state in this family, one has α ∼ = 5. The dominant decay channel of these massive string states is by emission of soft massless particles. The quantum states can be viewed semiclassically as closed strings which cannot break during the classical evolution.

We discuss the possibility of having multiple Kaluza-Klein dark matter candidates which arise naturally in generic type-IIB string theory compactification scenarios. These dark matter candidates reside in various throats of the Calabi-Yau manifold. In principle, they can come with a varied range of masses in four dimensions depending upon the hierarchical warping of the throats. We show that consistency with cosmological bounds and four-dimensional effective theory description imposes strong constraints on the parameter space and the geometry of the throats. With a rather model-independent approach, we find that the mass scales allowed for the Kaluza-Klein dark matter particles in various throats can vary between 0.1 eV and 10 TeV, depending upon the throat geometry. Thus, there could be simultaneously more than one kind of cold (and possibly warm and hot) dark matter components residing in the Universe. This multiple dark matter scenario could weaken the bound on a conventional supersymmetric dark matter candidate and could also account for extra relativistic degrees of freedom in our Universe.

In ten dimensional type II superstring, all perturbative massive states are unstable, typically with a short lifetime compared to the string scale. We find that the lifetime of the average string state of mass M has the asymptotic formT ≤ const.g −2 s M −1 . The most stable string state seems to be a certain state with high angular momentum which can be classically viewed as a circular string rotating in several planes ("the rotating ring"), predominantly decaying by radiating soft massless NS-NS particles, with a lifetime T = c 0 g −2 s M 5 . Remarkably, the dominant channel is the decay into a similar rotating ring state of smaller mass. The total lifetime to shrink to zero size is ∼ M 7 . In the presence of D branes, decay channels involving open strings in the final state are exponentially suppressed, so the lifetime is still proportional to M 5 , except for a D brane at a special angle or flux. For large mass, the spectrum for massless emission exhibits qualitative features typical of a thermal spectrum, such as a maximum and an exponential tail. We also discuss the decay properties of rotating rings in the case of compact dimensions.