String-driven anisotropy damping in Kasner spacetime

We investigate the problem of anisotropy damping in the Kasner cosmological spacetime by bosonic strings. It is shown that bosonic strings can account under proper circumstances, for the anisotropy damping that may took place in the primordial stages of the evolution of the universe, which resulted in the highly homogeneous and isotropic present phase. Assuming that at the verge of the initial singularity (t = 0), quantum effects resulted in the production of particles, which lire string-like structures, anisotropy damp ing is then a possible outcome. This is also verified by qualitative and qu antitative arguments in the case where one considers the full back-reaction problem. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.