Related papers: Large Field Ranges from Aligned and Misaligned Win…
We study the effects of particle production on the evolution of the inflaton field in an axion monodromy model with the goal of discovering in which situations the resulting dynamics will be consistent with the {\it swampland constraints}.…
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…
This paper is concerned with string cosmology and the dynamics of multiple scalar fields in potentials that can become negative, and their features as (Early) Dark Energy models. Our point of departure is the "String Axiverse", a scenario…
The original model of axion natural inflation produces a tensor-to-scalar ratio above the experimental limit. Aligned axion inflation admits inflationary trajectories that originate near a saddle point of the two-field potential, and…
In this paper, we investigate the no-boundary wave function and the complex-valued instantons for two-field inflation models that have different masses. If there is a relatively massive direction, to classicalize the massive field, the…
Multiple axions form a landscape in the presence of various shift symmetry breaking terms. Eternal inflation populates the axion landscape, continuously creating new universes by bubble nucleation. Slow-roll inflation takes place after the…
In this work we study slow-roll inflation for a vector-tensor model with massive vector fields non-minimally coupled to gravity. The model under consideration has arbitrary parameters for each geometrical coupling. Taking into account a…
We perform a general algebraic analysis on the possibility of realising slow-roll inflation in the moduli sector of string models. This problem turns out to be very closely related to the characterisation of models admitting metastable…
Inflationary perturbations in multi-field theories can exhibit a transient tachyonic instability as a consequence of their non-trivial motion in the internal field space. When an effective single-field description is applicable, the…
The large tensor spectrum recently observed by the BICEP2 Collaboration requires a super-Planckian field variation of the inflaton in the single-field inflationary scenario. The required slow-roll parameter \epsilon \approx 0.01 would…
We study the minimal requirements to obtain axion strings for axions with exponentially good quality. These ingredients appear in theories where an axion coming from a higher-form gauge field mixes with the phase of a complex scalar field…
It is unknown whether a bound on axion field ranges exists within quantum gravity. We study axion field ranges using extended supersymmetry, in particular allowing an analysis within strongly coupled regions of moduli space. We apply this…
We propose the mechanism to disentangle the decay constant of closed string axion from the string scale in the framework of type II string theory on Calabi-Yau manifold. We find that the quantum and geometrical corrections in the…
Axions play a central role in many realizations of large field models of inflation and in recent alternative mechanisms for generating primordial tensor modes in small field models. If these axions couple to gauge fields, the coupling…
We initiate a comprehensive survey of axion inflation in compactifications of type IIB string theory on Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric varieties. For every threefold with $h^{1,1} \le 4$ in the Kreuzer-Skarke database, we compute the…
Wrapped branes in string compactifications introduce a monodromy that extends the field range of individual closed-string axions to beyond the Planck scale. Furthermore, approximate shift symmetries of the system naturally control…
We study the pattern of oscillations in the primordial power spectrum in axion monodromy inflation, accounting for drifts in the oscillation period that can be important for comparing to cosmological data. In these models the potential…
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 study inflation in models with many interacting fields subject to randomly generated scalar potentials. We use methods from non-equilibrium random matrix theory to construct the potentials and an adaption of the 'transport method' to…
We present two families of multi-field potentials that support inflation while satisfying the refined de Sitter and the distance swampland conjectures. Both families feature Planck-compatible phenomenology. The first is a helix-type…