Spinflation and cycling branes in warped throats

Abstract

The implications of brane motion in angular directions of Calabi-Yau flux compactifications are discussed from the point of view of an observer living on the worldvolume of the brane and from the point of view of an observer living elsewhere in the three non-compact dimensions. The brane observer can experience cosmological bounces and cyclic behavior of the scale factor induced by centrifugal angular momentum barriers. Observers living elsewhere in the compactification experience marginally prolonged periods of inflation due to large angular momentum (spinflation). The presence of spinflaton fields (or other fields with non-standard kinetic terms) during inflation may lead to interesting observational signatures in the cosmic microwave background radiation.