Some aspects of brane inflation

The inflaton potential in four-dimensional theory is rather arbitrary, and fine-tuning is required generically. By contrast, inflation in the brane world scenario has the interesting feature that the inflaton potential is motivated from higher-dimensional gravity, or more generally, from bulk modes or string theory. We emphasize this feature with examples. We also consider the impact on the spectrum of density perturbation from a velocity-dependent potential between branes in the brane inflationary scenario. It is likely that such a potential can have an observable effect on the ratio of tensor to scalar perturbations. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.