Statistical anisotropy from vector curvaton in D-brane inflation

We investigate the possibility of embedding the vector curvaton paradigm in D-brane models of inflation in type IIB string theory in a simple toy model. The vector curvaton is identified with the U (1) gauge field that lives on the world volume of a D3-brane, which may be stationary or undergoing general motion in the internal space. The dilaton is considered as a spectator field which modulates the evolution of the vector field. In this set-up, the vector curvaton is able to generate measurable statistical anisotropy in the spectrum and bispectrum of the curvature perturbation assuming that the dilaton evolves as e(-phi) proportional to a(2) where a(t) is the scale factor. Our work constitutes a first step towards exploring how such distinctive features may arise from the presence of several light fields that naturally appear in string theory models of cosmology. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.