Research Interest of Sarah Shandera

      Publication 1: Observing brane inflation (URL)
      Publication 2: Slow roll in brane inflation (URL)
      Publication 3: Interbrane interactions in compact spaces and brane inflation (URL)

    URL of Research: 

Statement of Interest:


  I am interested in connections between string theory and
cosmology. The most well-developed models of D-brane inflation are
interesting because they incorporate many intrinsically stringy
features, but can be used to calculate observable predictions quite
precisely. Our group at Cornell is currently interested in details of
the conifold geometry (particularly the class of supergravity
solutions dual to the full cascading gauge theory) since we expect
inflation as a generic feature of D-branes moving on this background.
I am also interested in the many topics related to the full flux
compactification picture, since any good model must ultimately
incorporate other aspects of cosmology (i.e. reheating, cosmic
strings) and particle physics (the SM), and be fully consistent from
the string theory side.