A Meandering Inflaton

If the cosmological inflationary scenario took place in the cosmic landscape in string theory, the inflaton, the scalar mode responsible for inflation, would have meandered in a complicated multi-dimensional potential. We show that this meandering property naturally leads to many e-folds of inflation, a necessary condition for a successful inflationary scenario. This behavior also leads to fluctuations in the primordial power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which may be detected in a near future cosmic variance limited experiment like PLANCK.Comment: minor additions, matched to published versio

Three-Family SU(5) Grand Unification in String Theory

We present two 3-family SU(5) grand unified models in the heterotic string theory. One model has 3 chiral families and 9 pairs of $5+{\overline 5}$ Higgs fields, and an asymptotically-free SU(2) X SU(2) hidden sector, where the two SU(2)s have different matter contents. The other model has 6 left-handed and 3 right-handed 10s, 12 left-handed and 9 right-handed ${\overline 5}$s, and an asymptotically-free SU(3) hidden sector. At the string scale, the gauge couplings $g^2$ of the hidden sector are three times as big as that of SU(5). In addition, both models have an anomalous U(1).Comment: 11 pages, Revtex 3.0, minor misprints correcte