Large Field Inflation/Quintessence and the Refined Swampland Distance Conjecture

Abstract

Attempts to construct string derived effective field theory models realizing large field inflation are plagued by control issues. Targeted at a broader audience, in this article we review recent progress in isolating the underlying conceptual reasons for this failure. Special emphasis is given to models of axion monodromy inflation and their relation to the Swampland Distance Conjecture. This discriminates effective actions that admit a UV completion, the landscape, from those that do not, the swampland. Since they are conceptually very similar, we also comment on implied challenges for axionic quintessence models.

23 pages, 7 figures, v2: ref. added, clarifications in section 6, contribution to the proceedings of the Corfu Summer Institute 2017 "Workshop on Testing Fundamental Physics Principles", 22 - 28 September, 2017, Corfu, Greece

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• On the Cosmological Implications of the String Swampland
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• A Stringy Test of the Scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture
• A note on Inflation and the Swampland
• dS Vacua and the Swampland
• Swampland conjecture in $f(R)$ gravity by the Noether Symmetry Approach
• Small-Field and Scale-Free: Inflation and Ekpyrosis at their Extremes
• Infinite Black Hole Entropies at Infinite Distances and Tower of States
• On the weak gravity conjecture in string theory with broken supersymmetry
• Dark Energy, Extra Dimensions, and the Swampland
• Large Field Ranges from Aligned and Misaligned Winding
• Quantum Circuit Complexity of Primordial Perturbations
• A dS obstruction and its phenomenological consequences
• Rigid nongeometric orientifolds and the swampland
• $T$-dualizing the de-Sitter no-go scenarios
• A stringy perspective on the coincidence problem
• Inflation as an Information Bottleneck - A strategy for identifying universality classes and making robust predictions
• Compact objects and the swampland
• The Swampland Spectrum Conjecture in Inflation
• GLSM for Calabi-Yau Manifolds of Berglund-Hubsch Type