Back to the origins of brane–antibrane inflation

Abstract We study a new framework for brane–antibrane inflation where moduli stabilisation relies purely on perturbative corrections to the effective action. This guarantees that the model does not suffer from the eta-problem. The inflationary potential has two contributions: the tension of an antibrane at the tip of a warped throat, and its Coulomb interaction with a mobile brane. This represents the first realisation of the original idea of brane–antibrane inflation, as opposed to inflection point inflation which arises when the moduli are fixed with non-perturbative effects. Moreover, we formulate the brane–antibrane dynamics as an F-term potential of a nilpotent superfield in a manifestly supersymmetric effective theory. We impose compatibility with data and consistency conditions on control over the approximations and find that slow-roll inflation can occur in a large region of the underlying parameter space. The scalar spectral index is in agreement with data and the tensor-to-scalar ratio is beyond current observational reach. Interestingly, after the end of inflation the volume mode can, but does not need to, evolve towards a late-time minimum at larger values.