Natural inflation and quantum gravity.
Cosmic inflation provides an attractive framework for understanding the early Universe and the cosmic microwave background. It can readily involve energies close to the scale at which quantum gravity effects become important. General considerations of black hole quantum mechanics suggest nontrivial constraints on any effective field theory model of inflation that emerges as a low-energy limit of quantum gravity, in particular, the constraint of the weak gravity conjecture. We show that higher-dimensional gauge and gravitational dynamics can elegantly satisfy these constraints and lead to a viable, theoretically controlled and predictive class of natural inflation models.
Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
Anton
A
de la Fuente
Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.|Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA.
Prashant
P
Saraswat
Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
Raman
R
Sundrum