Chasing brane inflation in string theory

We investigate the embedding of brane-antibrane inflation into a concrete type IIB string theory compactification with all moduli fixed. Specifically, we are considering a D3-brane, whose position represents the inflaton phi, in a warped conifold throat in the presence of supersymmetrically embedded D7-branes and an anti-D3-brane localized at the tip of the warped conifold cone. After presenting the moduli stabilization analysis for a general D7-brane embedding, we concentrate on two explicit models, the Ouyang and the Kuperstein embeddings. We analyze whether the forces induced by moduli stabilization and acting on the D3-brane might be canceled by fine-tuning so as to leave us with the original Coulomb attraction of the anti-D3-brane as the driving force for inflation. For a large class of D7-brane embeddings we obtain a negative result. Cancelations are possible only for very small intervals of phi around an inflection point and not globally. For the most part of its motion the inflaton then feels a steep, non-slow-roll potential. We study the inflationary dynamics induced by this potential.