Natural inflation from near alignment in heterotic string theory

We propose a model for large field inflation in heterotic string theory. The construction applies the near alignment mechanism of Kim, Nilles, and Peloso. By including gaugino condensates and world-sheet instanton nonperturbative effects, we obtain a large effective axion decay constant.

Figure 1

Contour plot for the two axion scalar potentials. Inflation is along the ${\psi }_2$ direction.