Successful modular cosmology

Abstract

We present a modular cosmology scenario where the difficulties encountered in conventional modular cosmology are solved in a self-consistent manner, with definite predictions to be tested by observation. Notably, the difficulty of the dilaton finding its way to a precarious weak coupling minimum is made irrelevant by having eternal modular inflation at the vacuum supersymmetry breaking scale after the dilaton is stabilised. Neither this eternal inflation nor the subsequent non-slow-roll modular inflation destabilise the dilaton from its precarious minimum due to the low energy scale of the inflation and consequent small back reaction on the dilaton potential. The observed flat CMB spectrum is obtained from fluctuations in the angular component of a modulus near a symmetric point, which are hugely magnified by the roll down of the modulus to Planckian values, allowing them to dominate the final curvature perturbation. We also give precise calculations of the spectral index and its running.