The DBI action, higher-derivative supergravity, and flattening inflaton potentials

In string theory compactifications it is common to find an effective Lagrangian for the scalar fields with a non-canonical kinetic term. We study the effective action of the scalar position moduli of Type II Dp-branes. In many instances the kinetic terms are in fact modified by a term proportional to the scalar potential itself. This can be linked to the appearance of higher-dimensional supersymmetric operators correcting the Kahler potential. We identify the supersymmetric dimension-eight operators describing the alpha' corrections captured by the D-brane Dirac-Born-Infeld action. Our analysis then allows an embedding of the D-brane moduli effective action into an N = 1 supergravity formulation. The effects of the potential-dependent kinetic terms may be very important if one of the scalars is the inflaton, since they lead to a flattening of the scalar potential. We analyze this flattening effect in detail and compute its impact on the CMB observables for single-field inflation with monomial potentials.