Speaker
Description
Recent results from DESI indicate that the accelerated expansion of the Universe may not be fully explained by a simple cosmological constant and instead may point toward a dynamical form of dark energy. At the same time, modular symmetries are emerging as important ingredients in string theory, as modular invariance is naturally built into many string compactifications. In this work, we explore a possible connection between these ideas by focusing on scalar potentials arising in heterotic orbifolds, where the underlying geometry simultaneously shapes the flavor structure and the dynamics of the moduli. An interesting feature is that the dynamics of these modular fields can give rise to multifield hilltop quintessence, compatible with recent observations and consistent with the Swampland conjectures.