On the possibility of large axion moduli spaces

By Tom Rudelius. 2014

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the diameters of axion moduli spaces, focusing primarily on type IIB compactifications on Calabi-Yau three-folds. In this case, we derive a stringent bound on the diameter in the large volume region of parameter space for Calabi-Yaus with simplicial Kähler cone. This bound can be violated by Calabi-Yaus with non-simplicial Kähler cones, but additional contributions are introduced to the effective action which can restrict the field range accessible to the axions. We perform a statistical analysis of simulated moduli spaces, finding in all cases that these additional contributions restrict the diameter so that these moduli spaces are no more likely to yield successful inflation than those with simplicial Kähler cone or with far fewer axions. Further heuristic arguments for axions in other corners of the duality web suggest that the difficulty observed in [1] of finding an axion decay constant parametrically larger than Mp applies not only to individual axions, but to the diagonals of axion moduli space as well. This observation is shown to follow from the weak gravity conjecture of [2], so it likely applies not only to axions in string theory, but also to axions in any consistent theory of quantum gravity.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/23bd42e072b3b28c693362d2da20e43a3163588a

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Citations in the corpus

Weak gravity strongly constrains large-field axion inflation (2015, background): “Axion fields with superPlanckian decay constants appear to be rare in string theory vacua [36, 37], which may be a suggestive hint of a more general principle.”
The Weak Gravity Conjecture in three dimensions (2016, methodology): “In particular, it has been recently applied to large-field inflationary models and relaxions [2–22].”
Evidence for a sublattice weak gravity conjecture (2016, background): “From a phenomenological perspective, the WGC is especially interesting due to its ability to constrain models of large-field axion inflation [6–25].”
Transplanckian axions!? (2015, background): “Notice that the generalized Weak Gravity Conjecture of [57] (see also [21, 22]) would have resulted in the more stringent bound M .”
Sharpening the weak gravity conjecture with dimensional reduction (2015, background): “From this we immediately see that for a collection of N gauge groups with equal gauge couplings and spectra of charged particles the WGC bound becomes stronger by a factor of √ N [20], a fact that has important consequences for the idea of N -flation [4, 14].”
Early dark energy does not restore cosmological concordance (2020, background): “13 that the distribution of axion decay constants is highly peaked at f ∼ Mpl, in stark contrast with theory expectations, both from statistical arguments (Halverson et al. (2019)), and the Weak Gravity Conjecture (Arkani-Hamed et al. (2007)); see, e.g., Rudelius (2015b).”
Fencing in the swampland: quantum gravity constraints on large field inflation (2015, background): “It is now easy to show with a few examples how naive models of effective field theories of inflation with several axions fail to satisfy the convex hull condition [19,24].”
Constraints on axion inflation from the weak gravity conjecture (2015, background): “The story here regarding decay constant alignment is reminiscent of that observed in [24] regarding the single axion case and [28] regarding the many axion one.”