Gravity Waves and Linear Inflation from Axion Monodromy
By Liam McAllister, E. Silverstein, A. Westphal. 2008
846 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Wrapped branes in string compactifications introduce a monodromy that extends the field range of individual closed-string axions to beyond the Planck scale. Furthermore, approximate shift symmetries of the system naturally control corrections to the axion potential. This suggests a general mechanism for chaotic inflation driven by monodromy-extended closed-string axions. We systematically analyze this possibility and show that the mechanism is compatible with moduli stabilization and can be realized in many types of compactifications, including warped Calabi-Yau manifolds and more general Ricci-curved spaces. In this broad class of models, the potential is linear in the canonical inflaton field, predicting a tensor to scalar ratio r{approx_equal}0.07 accessible to upcoming cosmic microwave background observations.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc92a3823263995526bdd63aa17c8b0fc42ebff4
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Citations in the corpus
- Trapped Inflation (2009, methodology): “A similar structure, with somewhat more flexibility in the parameters, arises in the setting [15] to construct trapped inflation from string theory.”
- Winding out of the Swamp: Evading the Weak Gravity Conjecture with F-term Winding Inflation? (2015, background): “Another proposal for large field inflation in string theory employs monodromies which extend the originally compact field space of an axion [6–8].”
- Backreacted axion field ranges in string theory (2016, neutral): “The primary focus of this work will be on a different idea for realising super-Planckian displacements with axions which is termed axion monodromy [29,30].”
- Primordial black holes and gravitational waves from parametric amplification of curvature perturbations (2019, background): “Such a model can naturally arise from brane inflation and axion inflation [49–53].”
- New models of chaotic inflation in supergravity (2010, methodology): “A similar idea was used in the models of chaotic inflation in string theory [15, 16].”
- Perturbations in Chromo-Natural Inflation (2013, background): “Recently, models have been found in string theory where an axion undergoes monodromy, which appears to be a more promising direction for realizing axion inflation in a way that is under theoretical control [8, 9].”
- Gauge Field Production in Axion Inflation: Consequences for Monodromy, non-Gaussianity in the CMB, and Gravitational Waves at Interferometers (2011, methodology): “In particular we compute the size of the coupling (1) in a class of axion monodromy inflation in IIB string theory [28, 29, 33].”
- Oscillations in the CMB from axion monodromy inflation (2009, methodology): “The axion monodromy inflation scenario of [5] is falsifiable on the basis of its tensor signature, r ≈ 0.”
- Resonant non-gaussianity (2010, background): “The bispectrum for a linear potential We will now consider axion monodromy inflation [8,9] in some detail as a special case.”
- Towards universal axion inflation and reheating in string theory (2014, background): “A second variation is so-called axion monodromy inflation [10–12], where the shift symmetry is broken by the presence of a brane, inducing an approximately linear (or quadratic) potential for the axion.”
- Planckian axions and the Weak Gravity Conjecture (2015, background): “In axion monodromy scenarios [5, 6], multiple traversals of a sub-Planckian fundamental period lead to a super-Planckian displacement.”
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