Related papers: Backreacted Axion Field Ranges in String Theory
With the advent of new missions to probe spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background with unprecedented precision, the study of theoretical predictions of these signals becomes a promising avenue to test our description of the…
Certain inflationary models can feature periods of preheating - an era preceding reheating during which parametric resonance triggers an exponential production of bosons. This non-perturbative process can have significant impact on the…
The construction of meta-stable four-dimensional de Sitter vacua in type IIB string compactifications represents an important question and an ongoing area of work. There is considerable support both for stringy de Sitter vacua in the…
We propose a model for large field inflation in heterotic string theory. The construction applies the near alignment mechanism of Kim, Nilles, and Peloso. By including gaugino condensates and world-sheet instanton non-perturbative effects,…
It is known that Yang-Mills theories, especially in the large-$N$ limit, exhibit a $\theta$-vacuum structure with a multi-branched vacuum energy. In this work, we demonstrate that this multi-branch structure can play a crucial role in axion…
Axion fluctuations generated during inflation lead to isocurvature and non-Gaussian temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Following a previous analysis for the model independent string axion we consider the…
We study compactifications of type IIA string theory on Calabi-Yau manifolds that are mirror to a subset of the type IIB LARGE-volume models. A combination of flux, alpha' corrections and non-perturbative effects stabilises the moduli in a…
We focus on the massive gauge theory formulation of axion monodromy inflation. We argue that a gauge symmetry hidden in these models is the key protection mechanism from dangerous corrections from both field theory and gravitational…
We propose a new realization of axion monodromy inflation in which axion monodromy arises from torsional cycles in a type IIB compactification. A class of monomial potentials is obtained with specific values for the power index. Moreover,…
We investigate the axion inflation model derived by poly-instanton effects in type II superstring theories. Poly-instanton effects are instanton effects corrected by another instanton and it can generate the modulus-axion potential with the…
The unwinding inflation mechanism is studied in a type IIB flux compactification where all moduli are stabilized using flux, non-perturbative effects, and the leading alpha' corrections of the large volume scenario. We consider the…
Models of axion inflation are particularly interesting since they provide a natural justification for the flatness of the potential over a super-Planckian distance, namely the approximate shift-symmetry of the inflaton. In addition, most of…
We present a solvable same-sector effective theory for anomaly-inspired axion inflation, in which a heavy trace-anomaly mode dynamically backreacts on the axion potential. The tree-level elimination of the radial field resums the…
We demonstrate how recent developments in string field theory provide a framework to systematically study type II flux compactifications with non-trivial Ramond-Ramond profiles. We present an explicit example where physical observables can…
Several recent works have claimed that the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC) excludes super-Planckian displacements of axion fields, and hence large-field axion inflation, in the absence of monodromy. We argue that in theories with $N\gg1$…
In Aligned Natural Inflation, an alignment between different potential terms produces an inflaton excursion greater than the axion scales in the potential. We show that, starting from a general potential of two axions with two aligned…
We study the renormalization flow of axion electrodynamics, concentrating on the non-perturbative running of the axion-photon coupling and the mass of the axion (like) particle. Due to a non-renormalization property of the axion-photon…
We use the linear supermultiplet formalism of supergravity to study axion couplings and chiral anomalies in the context of field-theoretical Lagrangians describing orbifold compactifications beyond the classical approximation. By matching…
We derive stability conditions for the critical points of the no-scale scalar potential governing the dynamics of the complex structure moduli and the axio-dilaton in compactifications of type IIB string theory on Calabi-Yau three-folds. We…
We derive several no-go theorems in the context of massive type IIA string theory compactified to four dimensions in a way that, in the absence of fluxes, preserves N=1 supersymmetry. Our derivation is based on the dilaton, Kaehler and…