Shaft inflation in Randall-Sundrum model

Abstract

Shaft inflation is a model in which the inflaton potential approaches a plateau far from the origin, while it resembles chaotic inflation near the origin. Meanwhile, the Randall-Sundrum type II model (RSII) is an interesting extra-dimensional model to study cosmological phenomenology. In this paper, we study shaft inflation in the RSII model. We find that the predictions are in excellent agreement with observation. The fundamental five-dimensional Planck scale is found to be $M_5\simeq 10^{16}$ GeV, which is consistent with the lower bound $M_5\gtrsim 10^{9}$ GeV obtained from experimental Newtonian gravitational bound. This is an important result that can be used to explore further the implications of extra dimension in other contexts.