RG-induced modulus stabilization: perturbative de Sitter vacua and improved D3-D3¯ inflation

We propose a new mechanism that adapts to string theory a perturbative method for stabilizing moduli without leaving the domain of perturbative control, thereby evading the ‘Dine-Seiberg’ problem. The only required nonperturbative information comes from the standard renormalization-group resummation of leading logarithms that allow us simultaneously to work to a fixed order in the perturbative parameter α and to all orders in α ln τ where τ is a large extra-dimensional modulus. The resulting potential is naturally minimized for moduli of order τ ~ e1/α and so can be exponentially large given O$$ \mathcal{O} $$(10) input parameters. The mechanism relies on accidental low-energy scaling symmetries known to be generic and so is robust against UV details. The resulting compactifications generically break supersymmetry and 4D de Sitter solutions are relatively easy to achieve without additional uplifting. Variations on the theme lead to inflationary scenarios for which the size of the stabilized moduli differ significantly before and after inflation and so provide a dynamical mechanism whereby inflationary scales are much larger than late-time physical (e.g. supersymmetry breaking) scales, with this hierarchy contingent on past cosmic evolution with the inflaton playing a secondary late-time role as a relaxation field. We apply this formalism to warped D3-D3¯$$ \overline{\mathrm{D}3} $$ inflation using non-linearly realized supersymmetry to describe the antibrane tension and the Coulomb interaction, and show how doing so our perturbative modulus stabilization mechanism evades the η-problem that usually plagues this scenario. We speculate about the relevance of our formalism to tachyon condensation at later stages of brane-antibrane annihilation.