English

A worldsheet perspective on string inflation

High Energy Physics - Theory 2010-08-31 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We investigate the constraints of slow-roll inflation on the string worldsheet. A general gravity-matter set-up is used in which the worldsheet consists of an abstract CFT coupled to a 3+1 dimensional non-linear sigma model. The empirical slow-roll parameters are expressed in terms of the beta functions of operators in the matter/internal CFT and the beta function of the dilaton. The result confirms that inflation is only sensitive to macroscopic properties of the matter sector, and that in string theory inflation is a non-perturbative (in g_s) phenomenon and one must go beyond tree-level string theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1008.5024,
  title  = {A worldsheet perspective on string inflation},
  author = {Koenraad Schalm and Ted van der Aalst},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1008.5024},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

18 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T16:06:44.067Z