Realizing scale-invariant density perturbations in low-energy effective string theory

We discuss the realization of inflation and resulting cosmological perturbations in the low-energy effective string theory. In order to obtain nearly scale-invariant spectra of density perturbations and a suppressed tensor-to-scalar ratio, it is generally necessary that the dilaton field phi is effectively decoupled from gravity together with the existence of a slowly varying dilaton potential. We also study the effect of second-order corrections to the tree-level action which are the sum of a Gauss-Bonnet term coupled to phi and a kinetic term (del phi)(4). We find that it is possible to realize observationally supported spectra of scalar and tensor perturbations provided that the correction is dominated by the (del phi)(4) term even in the absence of the dilaton potential. When the Gauss-Bonnet term is dominant, tensor perturbations exhibit violent negative instabilities on small scales about a de Sitter background in spite of the fact that scale-invariant scalar perturbations can be achieved.