2006/12/07 by Katherine Freese, Freese, Katherine, James T. Liu +3 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Computational Physics and Python Applications #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #astro-ph #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-th/0612056
7 pages, revtex
arxiv created 2006/12/07 · openalex publication_date 2006/12/07 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Chain inflation takes place in the string theory landscape as the universe tunnels rapidly through a series of ever lower energy vacua such as may be characterized by quantized changes in four form fluxes. The string landscape may be well suited to an early period of rapid tunneling, as required by chain inflation, followed by a later period of slow tunneling, such as may be required to explain today's dark energy and small cosmological constant. Each tunneling event (which can alternatively be thought of as a nucleation of branes) provides a fraction of an e-folding of inflation, so that hundreds of tunneling events provide the requisite amount of inflation. A specific example from M-theory compactification on manifolds with non-trivial three-cycles is presented.