S. P. Miao, Taiwan), R. P. Woodard, USA)

We argue that the fine tuning problems of scalar-driven inflation may be worse than is commonly believed. The reason is that reheating requires the inflaton to be coupled to other matter fields whose vacuum fluctuations alter the inflaton potential. The usual response has been that even more fine-tuning of the classical potential $V(\varphi)$ can repair any damage done in this way. We point out that the effective potential in de Sitter background actually depends in a complicated way upon the dimensionless combination of $\varphi/H$. We also show that the factors of $H$ which occur in de Sitter do not even correspond to local functionals of the metric for general geometries, nor are they Planck-suppressed.

Roy Ben-Israel, Amit Giveon, Nissan Itzhaki, Lior Liram

The target-space interpretation of the exact (in $\alpha'$) reflection coefficient for scattering from Euclidean black-hole horizons in classical string theory is studied. For concreteness, we focus on the solvable $SL(2, \mathbb{R})_k/U(1)$ black hole. It is shown that it exhibits a fascinating UV/IR mixing, dramatically modifying the late-time behavior of general relativity. We speculate that this might play an important role in the black-hole information puzzle, as well as in clarifying features related with the non-locality of Little String Theory.