The Giant Inflaton

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel string theory inflation mechanism involving anti-D3 branes clustering and expanding into NS5-branes, with potential for slow-roll inflation under specific conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a new inflation scenario based on anti-brane dynamics and flux polarization, expanding the landscape of string cosmology models.

Findings

Potential for slow-roll inflation in string theory models.

Conditions under which anti-branes expand into NS5-branes.

Energy scale considerations for inflation viability.

Abstract

We investigate a new mechanism for realizing slow roll inflation in string theory, based on the dynamics of p anti-D3 branes in a class of mildly warped flux compactifications. Attracted to the bottom of a warped conifold throat, the anti-branes then cluster due to a novel mechanism wherein the background flux polarizes in an attempt to screen them. Once they are sufficiently close, the M units of flux cause the anti-branes to expand into a fuzzy NS5-brane, which for rather generic choices of p/M will unwrap around the geometry, decaying into D3-branes via a classical process. We find that the effective potential governing this evolution possesses several epochs that can potentially support slow-roll inflation, provided the process can be arranged to take place at a high enough energy scale, of about one or two orders of magnitude below the Planck energy; this scale, however, lies just outside the bounds of our approximations.