Accidental Inflation in the Landscape

TL;DR

This paper explores how flux landscape scanning can naturally produce fine-tuning for inflationary parameters in string theory, and how eternal inflation offers initial conditions, demonstrated through a specific Calabi-Yau compactification.

Contribution

It shows that flux landscape scanning can account for fine-tuning in accidental inflation models and links eternal inflation to initial conditions within a specific string compactification.

Findings

Flux scanning can generate fine-tuning of inflation parameters.

Eternal inflation provides natural initial conditions.

Distribution of inflation observables can be derived from flux configurations.

Abstract

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 parameters of the theory needed to have inflation can be generically obtained by scanning the values of the fluxes over the landscape. Furthermore, we find that the existence of a landscape of eternal inflation in this model provides us with a natural theory of initial conditions for the inflationary period in our vacuum. We demonstrate how these two effects work in a small corner of the landscape associated with the complex structure of the Calabi-Yau manifold P^4_[1,1,1,6,9] by numerically investigating the flux vacua of a reduced moduli space. This allows us to obtain the distribution of observable parameters for inflation in this mini-landscape directly from the fluxes.