Published December 30, 2016 | Version v1
Journal article

Inflation expels runaways

  • 1. Department of Physics, Columbia University,New York, NY 10027 (United States)

Description

We argue that moduli stabilization generically restricts the evolution following transitions between weakly coupled de Sitter vacua and can induce a strong selection bias towards inflationary cosmologies. The energy density of domain walls between vacua typically destabilizes Kähler moduli and triggers a runaway towards large volume. This decompactification phase can collapse the new de Sitter region unless a minimum amount of inflation occurs after the transition. A stable vacuum transition is guaranteed only if the inflationary expansion generates overlapping past light cones for all observable modes originating from the reheating surface, which leads to an approximately flat and isotropic universe. High scale inflation is vastly favored. Our results point towards a framework for studying parameter fine-tuning and inflationary initial conditions in flux compactifications.

Availability note (English)

Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/JHEP12(2016)155; Available from http://repo.scoap3.org/record/18488

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Journal of High Energy Physics (Online)
Journal Volume
2016
Journal Issue
12
Journal Page Range
p. 155
ISSN
1029-8479

Optional Information

Copyright
Copyright (c) OPEN ACCESS, © The Authors
Notes
PUBLISHER-ID: JHEP12(2016)155; ARXIV:1608.07576; OAI: oai:repo.scoap3.org:18488
Funding organization
SCOAP3, CERN, Geneva (Switzerland)