Seminario Departamental

Dra. Ivone Zavala –U.Swansea–

Open string axions and the Weak Gravity Conjecture

I will discuss the possibility of realising large field decay constants for open string axions in warped geometries and its implications for the Weak Gravity Conjecture and cosmological inflation.
The open string axions can be a Wilson line wrapping a small cycle on the worldvolume of a wrapped Dp-brane and dually, a position modulus describing a Dp-brane cycling a large compact transverse direction.
I will show that  large decay constants can in principle be achieved in agreement with the WGC constraint applied to the brane world volume U(1). However the associated axions are not suitable inflaton candidates, since the string scale turns out to be too law compared to the inflationary scale.