Inflation in string theory: A graceful exit to the real world

The most important criteria for a successful inflation are: explaining the observed temperature anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation, and exiting inflation in a vacuum where it can excite the standard model quarks and leptons required for the success of big bang nucleosynthesis. In this paper, we provide the first ever closed-string model of inflation where the inflaton couplings to hidden sector, moduli sector, and visible sector fields can be computed, showing that inflation can lead to reheating the standard model degrees of freedom before the electro-weak scale.