We review the status of the fourth-order (quartic in the spacetime curvature) terms induced by superstrings/M-theory (compactified on a warped torus) in the leading order with respect to the Regge slope parameter, and study their (nonperturbative) impact on the evolution of the Hubble scale in the context of the four-dimensional FRW cosmology. After taking into account the quantum ambiguities in the definition of the off-shell superstring effective action, we propose the generalized Friedmann equations, find the existence of their (de Sitter) exact inflationary solutions without a spacetime singularity, and constrain the ambiguities by demanding stability and the scale factor duality invariance of our solutions. The most naive (Bel-Robinson tensor squared) quartic terms are ruled out, thus giving the evidence for the necessity of extra quartic (Ricci tensor-dependent) terms in the off-shell gravitational effective action for superstrings. Our methods are generalizable to the higher orders in the spacetime curvature.
Superconformal symmetry in 11D superspace and the M-theory effective action
