A Microscopic Limit on Gravitational Waves from D-brane Inflation

By D. Baumann, Liam McAllister. 2006

197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We derive a microscopic bound on the maximal field variation of the inflaton during warped D-brane inflation. By a result of Lyth, this implies an upper limit on the amount of gravitational waves produced during inflation. We show that a detection at the level r > 0.01 would falsify slow roll D-brane inflation. In DBI (Dirac-Bom-Infeld) inflation, detectable tensors may be possible in special compactifications, provided that r decreases rapidly during inflation. We also show that for the special case of DBI inflation with a quadratic potential, current observational constraints imply strong upper bounds on the five-form flux.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8276f430f7646b507042154dd38083fea82e5607

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Citations in the corpus

Towards an explicit model of D-brane inflation (2007, methodology): “3, we present an improved derivation of the field range bound of [21] that includes a non-trivial breathing mode of the compactification.”
Axion cosmology and the energy scale of inflation (2008, background): “[9] the region in which φ moves at least two Planck masses is E & 2.”
Exploring cosmic origins with CORE: Inflation (2016, background): “• Famously, for inflationary models driven by a fundamental scalar field, the value of r is related to the total field excursion [95, 96]”
D3-brane potentials from fluxes in AdS/CFT (2010, background): “[38], x = 2 φ Mpl < 4 √ N < 1, in an AdS5 ×X5 geometry with D3-brane charge N 1, implies that x is a good expansion parameter.”
Inflation and String Theory (2014, background): “27), we arrive at the remarkably simple formula [243]”
Axion inflation in type II string theory (2007, methodology): “The current experimental bound on gravitational waves is r 0.3 [3], but future experiments, including Planck, BICEP and Spider [13], might allow the observation of r with a precision down to r > 0.01.”
Primordial Non-Gaussianities from Inflation Models (2010, background): “01) [57]; considering an extreme case where the throat does not attach to a bulk, it is O(1) [58].”