Related papers: Is inflation from unwinding fluxes IIB?
We consider cosmological perturbations caused by modulated inflaton velocity. During inflation, the inflaton motion is damped and the velocity is determined by the parameters such as couplings or masses that may depend on light…
Fluxbrane inflation is a stringy version of D-term inflation in which two fluxed D7-branes move towards each other until their (relative) gauge flux annihilates. Compared to brane-antibrane inflation, the leading-order inflationary…
We examine the spectrum of inflaton fluctuations resulting from any given long period of exponential inflation. Infrared and ultraviolet divergences in the inflaton dispersion summed over all modes do not appear in our approach. We show how…
We investigate the effects of large inhomogeneities in both the inflaton field and its momentum. We find that in general, large kinetic perturbations reduce the number of e-folds of inflation. In particular, we observe that inflationary…
In a recent paper we showed how Starobinsky-like inflation could emerge from dilaton dynamics in brane cosmology scenarios based on string theory, in which our universe is represented as a three-brane and the effective potential acquires a…
At energies higher than the brane tension, the dynamics of a scalar field rolling down a potential are modified relative to the predictions of General Relativity. The modifications imply, among other things, that steeper potentials can be…
We study the possibility of extended inflation in the effective theory of gravity from strings compactified to four dimensions and find that it strongly depends on the mechanism of supersymmetry breaking. We consider a general class of…
We analyze the quantum-corrected moduli space of D7-brane position moduli with special emphasis on inflationary model building. D7-brane deformation moduli are key players in two recently proposed inflationary scenarios: The first, D7-brane…
Trapped inflation is a mechanism in which particle production from the moving inflaton is the main source of friction in the inflaton equation of motion. The produced fields source inflaton perturbations, which dominate over the vacuum…
A detection of primordial B-modes has been heralded not only as a smoking gun for the existence of inflation, but also as a way to establish the scale at which inflation took place. In this paper we critically reinvestigate the connection…
The lack of power on large scales (l < 40) might have been observed by the PLANCK satellite. We argue that this putative feature can be explained by a phase of fast roll at the onset of inflation. We show that in the context of single field…
Previous work on DBI inflation, which achieves inflation through the motion of a $D3$ brane as it moves through a warped throat compactification, has focused on the region far from the tip of the throat. Since reheating and other observable…
I describe a dynamical mechanism for solving the fine-tuning problem of brane-antibrane inflation. By inflating with stacks of branes and antibranes, the branes can naturally be trapped at a metastable minimum of the potential. As branes…
We propose an inflationary scenario, M-flation, in which inflation is driven by three $N\times N$ hermitian matrices $\Phi_i, i=1,2,3$. The inflation potential of our model, which is strongly motivated from string theory, is constructed…
We develop a numerical statistical method to study linear cosmological fluctuations in inflationary scenarios with multiple fields, and apply it to an ensemble of six-field inflection point models in string theory. The latter are concrete…
We study some aspects of fine tuning in inflationary scenarios within string theory flux compactifications and, in particular, in models of accidental inflation. We investigate the possibility that the apparent fine-tuning of the low energy…
We present a model for quintessential inflation using a string modulus for the inflaton - quintessence field. The scalar potential of our model is based on generic non-perturbative potentials arising in flux compactifications. We assume an…
We show that the use of higher dimensional wrapped branes can significantly extend the inflaton field range compared to brane inflation models which use D3-branes. We construct a simple inflationary model in terms of 5-branes wrapping a…
We demonstrate that a gas of wrapped branes in the early Universe can help resolve the cosmological Dine-Seiberg/Brustein-Steinhardt overshoot problem in the context of moduli stabilization with steep potentials in string theory. Starting…
Usual inflation is realized with a slow rolling scalar field minimally coupled to gravity. In contrast, we consider dynamics of a scalar with a flat effective potential, conformally coupled to gravity. Surprisingly, it contains an attractor…