Inflating in a Better Racetrack

By Jose J. Blanco-Pillado, C. Burgess, J. Cline, C. Escoda, M. Gómez-Reino, R. Kallosh, Andrei Linde, F. Quevedo. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2006

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a new version of our racetrack inflation scenario which, unlike our original proposal, is based on an explicit compactification of type IIB string theory: the Calabi-Yau manifold 4[1,1,1,6,9]. The axion-dilaton and all complex structure moduli are stabilized by fluxes. The remaining 2 Kahler moduli are stabilized by a nonperturbative superpotential, which has been explicitly computed. For this model we identify situations for which a linear combination of the axionic parts of the two Kahler moduli acts as an inflaton. As in our previous scenario, inflation begins at a saddle point of the scalar potential and proceeds as an eternal topological inflation. For a certain range of inflationary parameters, we obtain the COBE-normalized spectrum of metric perturbations and an inflationary scale of M = 3 × 1014 GeV. We discuss possible changes of parameters of our model and argue that anthropic considerations favor those parameters that lead to a nearly flat spectrum of inflationary perturbations, which in our case is characterized by the spectral index ns = 0.95.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/38f9b0796e15a636f250c0a3705e40684fefa3b6

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

Inflation and String Theory (2014, methodology): “5, we describe models in which the inflaton is a Kähler modulus (or the associated axion), including racetrack inflation [618, 619] and inflationary scenarios in large volume compactifications [43, 620, 621].”
Axion inflation in type II string theory (2007, background): “Specific scenarios include realizations of Kähler moduli inflation [7, 8], racetrack models [9] and the most intensively studied possibility of D-brane inflation [10, 5].”
Four-dimensional string compactifications with D-branes, orientifolds and fluxes (2006, background): “This has been demonstrated in much detail for some selected type IIB orientifold examples in [492, 349, 493, 340].”
Towards an explicit model of D-brane inflation (2007, background): “Similarly, in Kähler moduli inflation (cf the second reference in [7]), a particular term in the Kähler potential that could give Δη ∼ 1 has not yet been computed (though it has been conjectured that this term might vanish.”
Phenomenology of a pseudo-scalar inflaton: naturally large nongaussianity (2011, background): “There are a variety of interesting multi-field models involving axions, for example racetrack inflation [63, 64] and the axionic D3/D7 model [65].”