Natural Inflation and the Weak Gravity Conjecture: Part 1

Abstract

After the recent (now defunct) results from BICEP2 on CMB B-mode polarizations, there has been considerable work on engineering a model of large field inflation. Natural inflation with axions is one class of such models and has received considerable attention. However, natural inflation models have so far strongly resisted embeddings in UV complete theories such as string theory. The speaker and his research team argue that this is no coincidence, but rather a consequence of the weak gravity conjecture which excludes a large class of large field inflation models.