Inflation from Tachyon Condensation, Large N Effects

TL;DR

This paper explores how tachyon condensation in string theory with multiple branes can naturally lead to inflationary cosmology, offering a string-inspired mechanism that resembles chaotic inflation and could address cosmological singularities.

Contribution

It demonstrates that tachyon dynamics in multi-brane systems can generically produce inflation, highlighting new string-theoretic pathways for early universe models.

Findings

Multiple tachyon fields assist inflation.

Staggered tachyon condensation can trigger inflation.

Late tachyon condensation may lead to inflation.

Abstract

Using only general properties of the tachyon potential we show that inflation may be generic when many branes and anti-branes become coincident. Inflation may occur because of: (1) the assistance of the many diagonal tachyon fields; (2) when the tachyons condense in a staggered fashion; or (3) when some of them condense very late. We point out that such inflation is in some sense a stringy implementation of chaotic inflation and may have important applications for ``regularizing'' a lopsided or singular cosmological compact surface.