Axion Monodromy Inflation with Warped KK-Modes

Hebecker, Arthur; Witkowski, Lukas T.; Moritz, Jakob; Westphal, Alexander

Preprint/Report

PUBDB-2015-05911

Axion Monodromy Inflation with Warped KK-Modes

Hebecker, A. ; Moritz, J. ; Westphal, A.DESY* ; Witkowski, L. T. (Corresponding author)

2015

Red Report (2015) [10.3204/PUBDB-2015-05911]

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Please use a persistent id in citations: doi:10.3204/PUBDB-2015-05911

Report No.: DESY-15-244; arXiv:1512.04463

Abstract: We present a particularly simple model of axion monodromy inflation: Our axion is the lowest-lying KK-mode of the RR-2-form-potential $C_2$ in the standard Klebanov-Strassler throat. One can think of this inflaton candidate as being defined by the integral of $C_2$ over the $S^2$ cycle of the throat. It obtains an exponentially small mass from the IR-region in which the $S^2$ shrinks to zero size. Crucially, the $S^2$ cycle has to be shared between two throats, such that the second locus where the $S^2$ shrinks is also in a warped region. Well-known problems like the potentially dangerous back-reaction of brane/antibrane pairs and explicit supersymmetry breaking are not present in our scenario. The inflaton back-reaction on the geometry turns out to be controlled by the string coupling $g_s$. We hope that our setting is simple enough for many critical consistency issues of large-field inflation in string theory to be addressed at a quantitative level.

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