A Potential Mechanism for Inflation from Swampland Conjectures

Understand

Inflation is the currently accepted paradigm for the beginnings of the Universe.

• To explain the observed almost scale invariant spectrum of density perturbations with only a slight spectral tilt, inflation must have been "slow roll", that is with a potential with sufficiently small slope.
• While the origin of inflationary structure is intrinsically quantum mechanical, gravity gets treated semiclassically within inflationary models.
• Recent work, in terms of the so called de-Sitter swampland conjecture, has called into question whether slow roll inflation is consistent with a complete theory of quantum gravity in the presence of a positive vacuum energy density, which is a key ingredient in the inflationary paradigm.