Winding out of the Swamp: Evading the Weak Gravity Conjecture with F-term Winding Inflation?

By A. Hebecker, Patrick Mangat, Fabrizio Rompineve, Lukasz Witkowski. 2015

159 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We present a new model of large field inflation along a winding trajectory in the field space of two axionic fields, where the “axions” originate from the complex structure moduli sector of a Calabi–Yau 3-fold at large complex structure. The winding trajectory arises from fixing one combination of axions by bulk fluxes and allows for a transplanckian effective field range. The inflaton potential arises from small “instantonic” corrections to the geometry and realises natural inflation. By working in a regime of large complex structure for two complex structure moduli the inflaton potential can be made subdominant without severe tuning. We also discuss the impact of the recent ‘no-go theorems’ for transplanckian axion periodicities on our work. Interestingly, our setup seems to realise a loophole pointed out in arXiv:1503.00795 and arXiv:1503.04783 : our construction is a candidate for a string theory model of large field inflation which is consistent with the mild form of the weak gravity conjecture for axions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be9b4a98356b019315a21eda52a5b5f24bab3490

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Citations in the corpus

Euclidean Wormholes, Baby Universes, and Their Impact on Particle Physics and Cosmology (2018, background): “Setups in which the instanton that satisfies the WGC is not the one of lowest charge have been proposed as a loophole to this strong constraint [75,77,80] and are being actively investigated [79].”
Sharpening the weak gravity conjecture with dimensional reduction (2015, background): “For example, it places certain theories of large-field inflation in the Swampland [4–15].”
Backreacted axion field ranges in string theory (2016, unknown): “In this section we consider an axion alignment scenario, as in [21] but where the alignment is induced through fluxes [24, 27].”
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].”
The Swampland: Introduction and Review (2019, methodology): “8, within string theory can be understood as Higgsing of linear combinations of 0-forms [86,87], while here we consider the 1-form version.”
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].”