English

Gauged M-flation, its UV sensitivity and Spectator Species

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-03-17 v3 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

In this paper we study gauged M-flation, an inflationary model in which inflation is driven by three NxN scalar field matrices in the adjoint representation of U(N) gauge group. We focus our study on the gauged M-flation model which could be derived from the dynamics of a stack of D3-branes in appropriate background flux. The background inflationary dynamics is unaltered compared to the ungauged case of [arXiv:0903.1481[hep-th]], while the spectrum of "spectator species", the isocurvature modes, differs from the ungauged case. Presence of a large number of spectators, although irrelevant to the slow-roll inflationary dynamics has been argued to lower the effective UV cutoff Λ\Lambda of the theory from the Planck mass, invalidating the main advantage of M-flation in not having super-Planckian field values and unnaturally small couplings. Through a careful analysis of the spectrum of the spectators we argue that, contrary to what happens in N-flation models, M-flation is still UV safe with the modified (reduced) effective UV cutoff Λ\Lambda, which we show to be of order (0.5-1)x10^{-1} M_{pl}. Moreover, we argue that the string scale in our gauged M-flation model is larger than Λ\Lambda by a factor of 10 and hence one can also neglect stringy effects. We also comment on the stability of classical inflationary paths in the gauged M-flation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1101.0048,
  title  = {Gauged M-flation, its UV sensitivity and Spectator Species},
  author = {A. Ashoorioon and M. M. Sheikh-Jabbari},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.0048},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

16 pages, no figures; v2: added remarks and two references; v3: JCAP version