On warped string vacuum profiles and cosmologies. Part I. Supersymmetric strings

We investigate in detail solutions of supergravity that involve warped products of flat geometries of the type Mp+1× R × TD−p−2 depending on a single coordinate. In the absence of fluxes, the solutions include flat space and Kasner-like vacua that break all supersymmetries. In the presence of a symmetric flux, there are three families of solutions that are characterized by a pair of boundaries and have a singularity at one of them, the origin. The first family comprises supersymmetric vacua, which capture a universal limiting behavior at the origin. The first and second families also contain non-supersymmetric solutions whose behavior at the other boundary, which can lie at a finite or infinite distance, is captured by the no-flux solutions. The solutions of the third family have a second boundary at a finite distance where they approach again the supersymmetric backgrounds. These vacua exhibit a variety of interesting scenarios, which include compactifications on finite intervals and p + 1-dimensional effective theories where the string coupling has an upper bound. We also build corresponding cosmologies, and in some of them the string coupling can be finite throughout the evolution.