Related papers: Bounds on Slow Roll at the Boundary of the Landsca…
We take a pragmatic, model independent approach to single field slow-roll inflation by imposing conditions to the slow-roll parameter $\epsilon$ and its derivative $\epsilon^{\prime }.$ To accommodate the recent (large) values of $r$…
An important unsolved problem that affects practically all attempts to connect string theory to cosmology and phenomenology is how to distinguish effective field theories belonging to the string landscape from those that are not consistent…
Dimensional reduction has proven to be a surprisingly powerful tool for delineating the boundary between the string landscape and the swampland. Bounds from the Weak Gravity Conjecture and the Repulsive Force Conjecture, for instance, are…
In the context of quantum gravitational systems, we place bounds on regions in field space with slowly varying positive potentials. Using the fact that $V<\Lambda_s^2$, where $\Lambda_s(\phi)$ is the species scale, and the emergent string…
A finite volume symplectic manifold is said to have "packing stability" if the only obstruction to symplectically embedding sufficiently small balls is the volume obstruction. Packing stability has been shown in a variety of cases and it…
We study the late time behavior of the scalar part of the volume modulus and the dilaton in stringy quintessence model, focusing on their contributions to the Hubble slow-roll parameter $\epsilon$ which directly measures the deviation of…
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…
The rolling tachyon is a non-canonical scalar field model well motivated in string theory which naturally predicts variations of the fine-structure constant. Such variations can in principle lead to interesting observable consequences, but…
Motivated by the recently proposed bounds on the slow-roll parameters for scalar potentials arising from string/M-theory compactifications, a.k.a. the Refined de Sitter Swampland conjecture, we explore the sharpness of such constraints…
The boundary state associated with the rolling tachyon solution on an unstable D-brane contains a part that decays exponentially in the asymptotic past and the asymptotic future, but it also contains other parts which either remain constant…
In a scalar field theory, when the tree level potential admits broken symmetry ground states, the quantum corrections to the static effective potential are complex. (The imaginary part is a consequence of an instability towards phase…
The limiting slow dynamics of slow-fast, piecewise-linear, continuous systems of ODEs occurs on critical manifolds that are piecewise-linear. At points of non-differentiability, such manifolds are not normally hyperbolic and so the…
The late time behavior of the slow-roll parameter in the stringy quintessence model is studied when axion as well as saxion are allowed to move. Even though the potential is independent of the axion at tree level, the axion can move through…
The systole of a closed Riemannian manifold is the minimal length of a non-contractible closed loop. We give a uniform lower bound for the systole for large classes of simple arithmetic locally symmetric orbifolds. We establish new bounds…
Both in string field theory and in p-adic string theory the equations of motion involve infinite number of time derivatives. We argue that the initial value problem is qualitatively different from that obtained in the limit of many time…
We study the dynamics of light-like tachyon condensation in a linear dilaton background using level-truncated open string field theory. The equations of motion are found to be delay differential equations. This observation allows us to…
We provide evidence that slow roll is not possible in any parametrically controlled regime of the moduli space of string theory. This is proven in full generality in the asymptotic limit of the moduli space of type II and heterotic…
We analyze the physical (reduced) space of non-local theories, around the fixed points of these systems, by analyzing: i) the Hamiltonian constraints appearing in the 1+1 formulation of those theories, ii) the symplectic two form in the…
We make a number of conjectures about the geometry of continuous moduli parameterizing the string landscape. In particular we conjecture that such moduli are always given by expectation value of scalar fields and that moduli spaces with…
We examine the Swampland conjectures in the context of generic slow-roll thawing quintessence models. Defining $\lambda \equiv |V^{\prime}(\phi_i)/V(\phi_i)|$ and $K \equiv \sqrt{1 - 4V^{\prime \prime}(\phi_i)/3V(\phi_i)}$, where $\phi_i$…