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Warped Radion Inflation

We show that the radion in a warped geometry bounded by two branes can have a potential suitable for inflation. Our construction is based upon a solution known in string theory as the linear dilaton, in which the back-reaction from a bulk scalar Φis exactly accounted for. The radion, stabilized by Φ, is much heavier than the TeV scale and its couplings to the standard model are much more suppressed than in the usual Randall-Sundrum solution. We present a new formalism for obtaining approximate time-dependent solutions, based on perturbing the exact solution to the coupled Einstein and scalar field equations in the bulk. It allows the radion potential to be computed directly in terms of the brane potentials for Φ. We show that simple exponential potentials on the branes can lead to a 4D radion potential with a flattened hilltop form, yielding inflation with a spectral index of typically n_s=0.96 and no higher than 0.99. With more complicated brane potentials, the descent from the hilltop can be a linear potential, giving a tensor-to-scalar ratio as large as r=0.07 with n_s=0.974. The couplings of the radion to the standard model particles are dictated by general covariance, so the d