We carefully analyse the challenges posed by the construction of type IIB chiral global embeddings of Fibre Inflation with $$ \overline{\textrm{D}3} $$ uplift to a de Sitter vacuum. We present an explicit example involving an $\textit{h}$ = 4 Calabi-Yau manifold with a K3 fibration and a del Pezzo divisor supporting non-perturbative effects. The chosen orientifold involution induces O3-planes that can be placed on top of each other at the tip of the throat of a deformed conifold singularity. The D7-brane sector contains standard magnetised branes and a Whitney brane. The former induce chiral matter and generate quantum effects that stabilise the Kähler moduli, while the latter helps to increase the total D3-charge. We study in detail the constraints on the parameter space leading to an observationally viable inflationary dynamics, finding several regions where the effective field theory is under control.

Italy

Michele Cicoli

Antonella Grassi

Osmin Lacombe

Francisco Pedro

Chiral global embedding of Fibre Inflation with $$ \overline{\textrm{D}3} $$ uplift

We study a new framework for brane–antibrane inflation where moduli stabilisation relies purely on perturbative corrections to the effective action. This guarantees that the model does not suffer from the eta-problem. The inflationary potential has two contributions: the tension of an antibrane at the tip of a warped throat, and its Coulomb interaction with a mobile brane. This represents the first realisation of the original idea of brane–antibrane inflation, as opposed to inflection point inflation which arises when the moduli are fixed with non-perturbative effects. Moreover, we formulate the brane–antibrane dynamics as an F-term potential of a nilpotent superfield in a manifestly supersymmetric effective theory. We impose compatibility with data and consistency conditions on control over the approximations and find that slow-roll inflation can occur in a large region of the underlying parameter space. The scalar spectral index is in agreement with data and the tensor-to-scalar ratio is beyond current observational reach. Interestingly, after the end of inflation the volume mode can, but does not need to, evolve towards a late-time minimum at larger values.

United Kingdom

Christopher Hughes

Czechia

Bangladesh

Ahmed Kamal

Francesco Marino

Switzerland

not found

Fernando Quevedo

Mario Ramos-Hamud

Gonzalo Villa

Back to the origins of brane–antibrane inflation

We present a type IIB 4D string model with stabilised moduli which is able to describe the history of the universe from inflation to quintessence. The underlying Calabi-Yau volume is controlled by two moduli which are stabilised by perturbative effects. The lighter of them drives Fibre Inflation at a large energy scale. The two associated axions are ultra-light since they are lifted only at the non-perturbative level. The lighter of them can drive quintessence if its decay constant is large enough to prevent quantum diffusion during inflation from ruining the initial conditions. The right dark energy scale can be obtained via a large suppression from poly-instanton effects. The heavier axion gives a negligible contribution to dark matter since it starts oscillating after matter-radiation equality. If instead none of the two axions has a large decay constant, a mild alignment allows the lighter axion to drive quintessence, while the heavier can be at most a few percent of dark matter due to isocurvature and UV bounds. In both cases dark matter can also come from either primordial black holes or the QCD axion.

Francesc Cunillera

Antonio Padilla

From inflation to quintessence: a history of the universe in string theory

We present a new model of string inflation driven by a blow-up Kähler modulus of type IIb compactifications with a potential generated by string loops. Slow-roll is naturally realized thanks to the fact that the blow-up mode is a leading-order flat direction lifted by string loops which are unavoidable and generate a plateau at large field values. We check that throughout the whole inflationary dynamics the effective field theory is under control. We perform a phenomenological analysis determining the exact number of efoldings by studying the post-inflationary evolution. We determine the values of the microscopic parameters which lead to agreement with CMB data, together with the prediction of a tensor-to-scalar ratio of order r ∼ 10 −5.

Germany

Sukṛti Bansal

Luca Brunelli

Arthur Hebecker

Ruben Kuespert

Loop blow-up inflation

We study the phenomenology of superheavy decaying dark matter with mass around 1010 GeV which can arise in the low-energy limit of string compactifications. Generic features of string theory setups (such as high scale supersymmetry breaking and epochs of early matter domination driven by string moduli) can accommodate superheavy dark matter with the correct relic abundance. In addition, stringy instantons induce tiny R-parity violating couplings which make dark matter unstable with a lifetime well above the age of the Universe. Adopting a model-independent approach, we compute the flux and spectrum of high-energy gamma rays and neutrinos from three-body decays of superheavy dark matter and constrain its mass-lifetime plane with current observations and future experiments. We show that these bounds have only a mild dependence on the exact nature of neutralino dark matter and its decay channels. Applying these constraints to an explicit string model sets an upper bound of   <math> <mi>O</mi> </math>  $$ \mathcal{O} $$ (0.1) on the string coupling, ensuring that the effective field theory is in the perturbative regime.

United States

Rouzbeh Allahverdi

Belgium

Chiara Arina

Marco Chianese

Fabio Maltoni

Daniele Massaro

Poland

Jacek Osiński

Phenomenology of superheavy decaying dark matter from string theory

We quantitatively estimate the leading higher derivative corrections to   <math> <mi>N</mi> </math>  $$ \mathcal{N} $$  = 1 supergravity derived from IIB string compactifications and study how they may affect moduli stabilisation and LVS inflation models. Using the Kreuzer-Skarke database of 4D reflexive polytopes and their triangulated Calabi-Yau database, we present scanning results for a set of divisor topologies corresponding to threefolds with 1 ≤ h 1,1 ≤ 5. In particular, we find several geometries suitable to realise blow-up inflation, fibre inflation and poly-instantons inflation, together with a classification of the divisors topologies for which the leading higher derivative corrections to the inflationary potential vanish. In all other cases, we instead estimate numerically how these corrections modify the inflationary dynamics, finding that they do not destroy the predictions for the main cosmological observables.

Matteo Licheri

Pellegrino Piantadosi

Canada

India

Pramod Shukla

Higher derivative corrections to string inflation

Sequestering is a promising mechanism in 4D string models to reconcile high-scale inflation with low-energy supersymmetry. In this scenario the MSSM lives on branes at singularities and it is sequestered from the sources of supersymmetry breaking in the bulk. The soft-terms are suppressed with respect to the gravitino mass so that all moduli are heavy enough to avoid any cosmological moduli problem. In this paper we study stability bounds and flavour constraints on sequestered string models, finding that they can be satisfied if the soft-terms give rise to a mass spectrum typical of split supersymmetry with TeV-scale gauginos and sfermions around 107 GeV. When instead scalar and gaugino masses are of the same order of magnitude, large flavour changing neutral currents can be avoided only by pushing the soft-terms above 106 GeV. However this scenario is in tension with stability bounds due to the presence of charge and colour breaking vacua which could be populated in the early universe, and the possible emergence of directions along which the potential is unbounded from below.

Alessandro Cotellucci

Japan

Hajime Otsuka

Sequestered string models imply split supersymmetry

Starobinsky inflation is currently one of the best models concerning agreement with cosmological data. Despite this observational success, it is still lacking a robust embedding into a UV complete theory. Previous efforts to derive Starobinsky inflation from string theory have been based on the derivation of higher derivative curvature terms from the low-energy limit of ten-dimensional string theory. This approach is however known to fail due to the difficulty to tame the effect of contributions proportional to the Ricci scalar to a power larger than two. In this paper we investigate an alternative attempt which exploits instead the ubiquitous presence of scalar fields in string compactifications combined with the fact that Starobinsky inflation can be recast as Einstein gravity coupled to a scalar field with a precise potential and conformal coupling to matter fermions. After showing that the dilaton does not feature the right Yukawa coupling to matter, we focus in particular on type IIB Kähler moduli since they have shown to lead to exponential potentials with a Starobinsky-like plateau. We consider three classes of moduli with a different topological origin: the volume modulus, bulk fibre moduli, and blow-up modes. The only modulus with the correct coupling to matter is the volume mode but its potential does not feature any plateau at large field values. Fibre moduli admit instead a potential very similar to Starobinsky inflation with a natural suppression of higher curvature corrections, but they cannot reproduce the correct conformal coupling to matter. Blow-up modes have both a wrong potential and a wrong coupling. Our analysis implies therefore that embedding Starobinsky inflation into string theory seems rather hard. Finally, it provides a detailed derivation of the coupling to matter of fibre moduli which could be used as a way to discriminate Starobinsky from fibre inflation.

Max Brinkmann

Austria

Pietro Zito

Starobinsky inflation from string theory?

Early Dark Energy (EDE) is a promising model to resolve the Hubble Tension, that, informed by Cosmic Microwave Background data, features a generalization of the potential energy usually associated with axion-like particles. We develop realizations of EDE in type IIB string theory with the EDE field identified as either a C 4 or C 2 axion and with full closed string moduli stabilization within the framework of either KKLT or the Large Volume Scenario. We explain how to achieve a natural hierarchy between the EDE energy scale and that of the other fields within a controlled effective field theory. We argue that the data-driven EDE energy scale and decay constant can be achieved without any tuning of the microscopic parameters for EDE fields that violate the weak gravity conjecture, while for states that respect the conjecture it is necessary to introduce a fine-tuning. This singles out as the most promising EDE candidates, amongst several working models, the C 2 axions in LVS with 3 non-perturbative corrections to the superpotential generated by gaugino condensation on D7-branes with non-zero world-volume fluxes.

Ratul Mahanta

Evan McDonough

Marco Scalisi

Early Dark Energy in Type IIB String Theory

We obtain the joint distribution of the gravitino mass and the cosmological constant in KKLT and LVS models with anti-D3 brane uplifting described via the nilpotent goldstino formalism. Moduli stabilisation (of both complex structure and Kähler moduli) is incorporated so that we sample only over points corresponding to vacua. Our key inputs are the distributions of the flux superpotential, the string coupling and the hierarchies of warped throats. In the limit of zero cosmological constant, we find that both in KKLT and LVS the distributions are tilted favourably towards lower scales of supersymmetry breaking.

Anshuman Maharana

Kajal Singh

Kuver Sinha

Joint statistics of cosmological constant and SUSY breaking in flux vacua with nilpotent Goldstino