Advances in Inflation in String Theory

By D. Baumann, Liam McAllister. 2009

197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We provide a pedagogical overview of inflation in string theory. We focus upon the sensitivity of inflation to Planck-scale physics, which we argue provides both the primary motivation and the central theoretical challenge for the subject. We illustrate these issues through two case studies of inflationary scenarios in string theory: warped d-brane inflation and axion monodromy inflation. Finally, we indicate how future observations can test scenarios of inflation in string theory.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d952cc170e79c59849cfe4465c90c644abe98ebd

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Citations in the corpus

Power-counting and the validity of the classical approximation during inflation (2009, background): “In particular, it is often a bad approximation to work in the small-field limit that is implicit when expanding the potential in powers of φ, and neglecting terms beyond a particular power (like quartic) when in the inflationary regime, as has recently been re-emphasized within the context of string”
The Quest for B Modes from Inflationary Gravitational Waves (2015, methodology): “These include a review of curvaton models (Mazumdar & Rocher 2011), one about models with gauge fields (Maleknejad, Sheikh-Jabbari & Soda 2013), and others of models that embed inflation in string theory (Baumann & McAllister 2009, 2015; Westphal 2015).”
Primordial black holes from string inflation (2018, background): “One of the main advantages of embedding inflation in string theory is the possibility to motivate the presence of a symmetry which can protect the inflaton potential against quantum corrections which can spoil its flatness [18, 19].”
Phenomenology of a pseudo-scalar inflaton: naturally large nongaussianity (2011, background): “In this context, axions arise on dimensional reduction, from integrating p-form gauge potentials over p-cycles (see [49, 53]”
Oscillations in the CMB from axion monodromy inflation (2009, background): “Inflation is sensitive to Planck-scale physics: contributions to the effective action arising from integrating out degrees of freedom with masses as large as the Planck scale play a critical role in determining the background evolution, and hence the observable spectrum of perturbations (see [15] fo”
Brane-World Gravity (2004, unknown): “These models have also been important for building inflationary models in string theory, based on the motion of D3 branes in the warped throat [63, 133] (see the reviews [292, 32] and references therein).”
D3-brane potentials from fluxes in AdS/CFT (2010, unknown): “[6–8]).”
Simple exercises to flatten your potential (2010, background): “It is therefore of interest to model inflation within a UV-complete candidate for quantum gravity, of which string theory is our best-studied example (see [5] for a recent review).”