Effects of compactification in D-brane inflation.

In D3-brane inflation, the inflaton potential receives important contributions from sources in the compact space, such as fluxes, other D-branes, and orientifold planes. Most previous analyses have considered only the effects of sources near to the inflationary D3-brane, but in fact distant sources do not generically decouple and can critically influence the dynamics during inflation. We provide a systematic method for incorporating the effects of arbitrary distant sources as perturbations to the local supergravity background. We use this approach to obtain the structure of the potential for a D3-brane in a warped throat geometry attached to a general compact space. A significant, and well-known, contribution to this potential arises from quantum effects involved in the stabilization of the compactification volume. Our method automatically captures these effects, encoding them in a suitable flux background.