Warming up brane-antibrane inflation

We show that, in constructions with additional intersecting D-branes, brane-antibrane inflation may naturally occur in a warm regime, such that strong dissipative effects damp the inflaton’s motion, greatly alleviating the associated η-problem. We illustrate this for D3-D3¯ inflation in flat space with additional flavor D7 branes, where for a Coulomb-like or quadratic hybrid potential a sufficient number of e-folds may be obtained for perturbative couplings and O(10-104) branes. This is in clear contrast with the corresponding cold scenarios, thus setting the stage for more realistic constructions within fully stabilized compactifications. Such models generically predict a negligible amount of tensor perturbations and non-Gaussianity fNL˜O(10).