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Inflation, Higher Spins and the Swampland
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We study the implications on inflation of an infinite tower of higher-spin states with masses falling exponentially at large field distances, as dictated by the Swampland Distance Conjecture. We show that the Higuchi lower bound on the mass of the tower automatically translates into an upper bound on the inflaton excursion. Strikingly, the mere existence of all spins in the tower forbids any scalar displacement whatsoever, at arbitrarily small Hubble scales, and it turns out therefore incompatible with inflation. A certain field excursion is allowed only if the tower has a cut-off in spin. Finally, we show that this issue is circumvented in the case of a tower of string excitations precisely because of the existence of such a cut-off, which decreases fast enough in field space.
Forward citations
Cited by 3 Pith papers
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Distance-Higuchi Bounds on Inflationary Field Ranges and Lifetimes
A quasi-de Sitter inflationary phase cannot remain free of spin-2 ghosts for longer than the smaller of a classical slow-roll time and a quantum-diffusion time, both polynomial in 1/H.
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Inflationary Particle Production and the Swampland
Tower-induced corrections to inflationary observables scale as (H/Λsp)^{2+p} and are negligible whenever H≪Λsp.
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Inflationary constraints on the moduli-dependent species scale in modular invariant theories
For SL(2,Z) modular inflation models, the CMB spectral index and tensor-to-scalar ratio imply a gravitational species scale of about 10^16 GeV.
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