Abstract
The Swampland Distance Conjecture (SDC) constraints the dynamics emerging at infinite distances in field space of any effective field theory consistent with quantum gravity. It provides a relation between the cut-off in energies and the field range which, as we show, in the context of inflation it yields a universal upper bound on the inflaton excursion in terms of the tensor-to-scalar ratio, measured at typical CMB scales. In this note, we investigate the interplay between the SDC and the emergent inflationary physics around infinite distances singularities in string theory, with a special look at its significance for the α-attractor scenario of inflation. We show that the conjecture itself suggests that inflation may arise as an infinite distance phenomenon with the asymptotic kinetic structure typical of α-attractors. Furthermore, we argue that a proper string realisation of these cosmological models in Calabi-Yau manifolds should occur around infinite field distance singularities. However, such constructions typically imply that inflation should not take place in the limit where the inflaton kinetic term develops a pole but rather in the opposite regime. Finally, we study the constraints that the SDC poses on α-attractors and show that they still leave considerable room for compatibility with observations.
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Scalisi, M., Valenzuela, I. Swampland distance conjecture, inflation and α-attractors. J. High Energ. Phys. 2019, 160 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2019)160
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2019)160