The powers of monodromy

By Liam McAllister, E. Silverstein, A. Westphal, T. Wrase. 2014

230 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A bstractFlux couplings to string theory axions yield super-Planckian field ranges along which the axion potential energy grows. At the same time, other aspects of the physics remain essentially unchanged along these large displacements, respecting a discrete shift symmetry with a sub-Planckian period. After a general overview of this monodromy effect and its application to large-field inflation, we present new classes of specific models of monodromy inflation, with monomial potentials μ4−pϕp. A key simplification in these models is that the inflaton potential energy plays a leading role in moduli stabilization during inflation. The resulting inflaton-dependent shifts in the moduli fields lead to an effective flattening of the inflaton potential, i.e. a reduction of the exponent from a fiducial value p0 to p < p0. We focus on examples arising in compactifications of type IIB string theory on products of tori or Riemann surfaces, where the inflaton descends from the NS-NS two-form potential B2, with monodromy induced by a coupling to the R-R field strength F1. In this setting we exhibit models with p = 2/3, 4/3, 2, and 3, corresponding to predictions for the tensor-to-scalar ratio of r ≈ 0.04, 0.09, 0.13, and 0.2, respectively. Using mirror symmetry, we also motivate a second class of examples with the role of the axions played by the real parts of complex structure moduli, with fluxes inducing monodromy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/088a522246ca09aef82012a45fa3e6a6b9a478d9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Planck2018 results (2018, background): “Models with p = 1 or p = 2/3 (Silverstein & Westphal 2008; McAllister et al. 2010, 2014) are more compatible with the data.”
Gauge-preheating and the end of axion inflation (2015, background): “More recently, the observation that a single axion undergoing monodromy can have a small periodicity while ultimately traversing a large field range [16, 17] has seen resurgent interest in axion inflation [18–23].”
Cosmology with nilpotent superfields (2014, methodology): “J H E P 1 0 ( 2 0 1 4 ) 1 4 3 Particularly interesting examples of such models presented in [7], which suggest the supersymmetric versions of the axion monodromy [86], may be given as”