Brane-world inflation and the transition to standard cosmology
Journal of High Energy Physics 5:9 (2001)
Authors:
A Lukas, D Skinner
Abstract:
In the context of a five-dimensional brane-world model motivated from heterotic M-theory, we develop a framework for potential-driven brane-world inflation. Specifically this involves a classification of the various background solutions of (A)dS5 type, an analysis of five-dimensional slow-roll conditions and a study of how a transition to the flat vacuum state can be realized. It is shown that solutions with bulk potential and both brane potentials positive exist but are always non-separating and have a non-static orbifold. It turns out that, for this class of backgrounds, a transition to the flat vacuum state during inflation is effectively prevented by the rapidly expanding orbifold. We demonstrate that such a transition can be realized for solutions where one boundary potential is negative. For this case, we present two concrete inflationary models which exhibit the transition explicitly.
