Related papers: Problems with Tachyon Inflation
During hybrid inflation, the slowly-rolling inflaton field has a significant coupling to the trigger field which is responsible for most of the potential. Barring a fine-tuned accidental cancellation, this coupling induces a minimal…
In the framework of Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theories (SUSY GUTs), the universe undergoes a cascade of symmetry breakings, during which topological defects can be formed. We address the question of the probability of cosmic string…
Inflation is now a basic ingredient of the modern cosmology. After reviewing the basic characteristics of inflation, we briefly discuss inflation in string and brane theories, focusing on the problem of the exit from inflation in these…
We discuss quantum gravitational effects in Einstein theory coupled to periodic axion scalars to analyze the viability of several proposals to achieve superplanckian axion periods (aka decay constants) and their possible application to…
A string theory based inflationary model is developed where the inflaton interacts with a multitude of massive string level states causing dissipation of vacuum energy. Inflation terminates in a warm Universe without the need for reheating.
The decay constant of the QCD axion is required by observation to be small compared to the Planck scale. In theories of "natural inflation," and certain proposed anthropic solutions of the cosmological constant problem, it would be…
We continue the investigation of F-term axion monodromy inflation in string theory, while seriously taking the issue of moduli stabilization into account. For a number of closed and open string models, we show that they suffer from serious…
We present a cosmological landscape where the classical closed string tachyon field plays an important role in the framework of a critical bosonic compactification. Our cosmological solutions for a universe with constant curvature describes…
In these notes we provide a pedagogical introduction to the subject of tachyon condensation in Witten's cubic bosonic open string field theory. We use both the low-energy Yang-Mills description and the language of string field theory to…
The study of open string tachyon condensation in string field theory can be drastically simplified by making an appropriate choice of coordinates on the space of string fields. We show that a very natural coordinate system is suggested by…
In conventional scenario of thermal inflation, the requirement that the reheating temperature must be larger than the temperature of the nucleosynthesis puts a lower bound on the mass of the inflaton field. At the same time, the mass of the…
We present an explicit string realisation of a cosmological inflationary scenario we proposed recently within the framework of type IIB flux compactifications in the presence of three magnetised D7-brane stacks. Inflation takes place around…
Models of supersymmetric D-term inflation require a new mass scale near 10^{15-16} GeV in order to match the density perturbation spectrum observed by COBE. Attempts to obtain such a scale from the anomalous U(1) of string theories fail in…
Natural inflation relies on the existence of an axion decay constant which is super-Planckian. In string theory only sub-Planckian axion decay constants have been found in any controlled regime. However in field theory it is possible to…
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…
We demonstrate the attractor behavior of inflation driven by a scalar field or a tachyon field in the context of recently proposed four-dimensional effective gravity induced on the world-volume of a three-brane in five-dimensional Einstein…
It has been argued that rather generic features of string-inspired inflationary theories with low-energy supersymmetry (SUSY) make it difficult to achieve inflation with a Hubble scale H > m_{3/2}, where m_{3/2} is the gravitino mass in the…
We demonstrate that string motivated inflation ending via tachyonic instability leaves a detectable imprint on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation by virtue of the excitation of non-Gaussian gravitational fluctuations. The…
Large field excursions are required in a number of axion models of inflation. These models also possess global cosmic strings, around which the axion follows a path mirroring the inflationary trajectory. Cosmic strings are thus an…
We analyse the cosmological implications of brane-antibrane systems in string-theoretic orbifold and orientifold models. In a class of realistic models, consistency conditions require branes and antibranes to be stuck at different fixed…