2:30 pm Monday, 27 January 2003
Inflation offers solutions to many problems in cosmology, and the brane world model has many features that make it an attractive model for inflation. The inflaton potential created by the interaction of widely separated branes is very flat and generates enough e-folds. When the brane separation is small, tachyons appear, the pair of branes decays, inflation ends, and the universe is reheated. Even though topological defects are produced, it is argued that only cosmic strings are copiously produced, the production of dangerous domain walls and monopoles being suppressed. The COBE data on the CMB temperature anisotropy requires the string mass to be roughly $M_{GUT}$ and this in turn gives a value of the cosmic string tension just below the present experimental bound.
Paper reference: Brane Interaction as the Origin of Inflation -- N. Jones, H. Stoica, & S.-H. Henry Tye
Also: Cosmic String Production Towards the End of Brane Inflation -- S. Sarangi & S.-H. Henry Tye Rolling Tachyon in Brane World Cosmology from Superstring Field Theory -- G. Shiu, S.-H. Henry Tye, & I. Wasserman Brane Inflation -- G. Dvali & S.-H. Henry Tye