Unwinding Inflation

Understand

Higher-form flux that extends in all 3+1 dimensions of spacetime is a source of positive vacuum energy that can drive meta-stable eternal inflation.

• If the flux also threads compact extra dimensions, the spontaneous nucleation of a bubble of brane charged under the flux can trigger a classical cascade that steadily unwinds many units of flux, gradually decreasing the vacuum energy while inflating the bubble, until the cascade ends in the self-annihilation of the brane into radiation.
• With an initial number of flux quanta Q_{0} \simgeq N, this can result in N efolds of inflationary expansion while producing a scale-invariant spectrum of adiabatic density perturbations with amplitude and tilt consistent with observation.
• The power spectrum has an oscillatory component that does not decay away during inflation, relatively large tensor power, and interesting non-Gaussianities.