Transplanckian axion monodromy!?

Abstract

We show that warped throats of the Klebanov-Strassler kind, regarded as 5d flux compactifications on Sasaki-Einstein manifolds X, describe fully backreacted solutions of transplanckian axion monodromy. We show that the asymptotic Klebanov-Tseytlin solution features a 5d axion physically rolling through its dependence on an spatial coordinate, and traversing arbitrarily large distances in field space. The solution includes the backreaction on the breathing mode of the compactification space and on the vacuum energy, which yields a novel form of flattening. We establish the description of the system in terms of an effective 5d theory for the axion, and verify its validity in transplanckian regimes. In this context, rolling axion monodromy configurations with limited field space range would correspond, in the holographic dual field theory, to duality walls, which admit no embedding in string theory so far. We present an identical realization of transplanckian axion monodromy in 4d in fluxed version of AdS × X. We speculate that similar models in which the axion rolls in the time direction naturally correspond to embedding the same mechanism in de Sitter vacua, thus providing a natural arena for large field inflation, and potentially linking the swampland de Sitter and distance conjectures.