On the chaos of D-brane phase transitions

Abstract

We study small instanton (and brane recombination) phase transitions in phenomenological models built with D-branes. By explicitly describing the cosmological dynamics of the moduli and matter fields, we show that these transitions do not occur smoothly, but are typically chaotic with the gauge group of the low energy theory fluctuating in time. We comment on the potential implications for cosmological questions such as inflation.