Inflation from tachyon condensation, large N effects -: art. no. 103504

Using only general properties of the tachyon potential we show that inflation may be generic when many branes and antibranes become coincident. Inflation may occur (1) because of the assistance of the many diagonal tachyon fields, (2) when the tachyons condense in a staggered fashion, or (3) when some of them condense very late. We point out that such inflation is in some sense a stringy implementation of chaotic inflation and may have important applications for "regularizing" a lopsided or singular cosmological compact surface.