Narrow Results

Inspired by Wilson's paper on sectional curvatures of Kähler moduli, we consider a natural Riemannian metric on a hypersurface {f=1} in a real vector space, defined using the Hessian of a homogeneous polynomial f. We give examples to answer a question posed by Wilson about when this metric has nonpositive curvature. Also, we exhibit a large class of polynomials f on R³ such that the associated metric has constant negative curvature. We ask if our examples, together with one example by Dubrovin, are the only ones with constant negative curvature. This question can be rephrased as an appealing question in classical invariant theory, involving the "Clebsch covariant". We give a positive answer for polynomials of degree at most 4, as well as a partial result in any degree.

The end of inflation is connected to the standard cosmological scenario through reheating. During reheating, the inflaton oscillates around the minimum of the potential and thus decays into the daughter particles that populate the Universe at later times. Using cosmological evolution for observable CMB scales from the time of Hubble crossing to the present time, we translate the constraint on the spectral index $n_s$ from Planck data to the constraint on the reheating scenario in the context of Kähler moduli inflation. We find that the equation of state parameter plays a crucial role in the reheating analysis, however the details of the one parameter potential are irrelevant if the analysis is done strictly within the slow-roll formalism. In addition, we extend the de facto analysis generally done only for the pivot scale to all the observable scales which crossed the Hubble radius during inflation, where we study how the maximum number of e-folds varies for different scales, and the effect of the equation of state and potential parameters.