  We investigate a new mechanism for realizing slow roll inflation in string
theory, based on the dynamics of p anti-D3 branes in a class of mildly warped
flux compactifications. Attracted to the bottom of a warped conifold throat,
the anti-branes then cluster due to a novel mechanism wherein the background
flux polarizes in an attempt to screen them. Once they are sufficiently close,
the M units of flux cause the anti-branes to expand into a fuzzy NS5-brane,
which for rather generic choices of p/M will unwrap around the geometry,
decaying into D3-branes via a classical process. We find that the effective
potential governing this evolution possesses several epochs that can
potentially support slow-roll inflation, provided the process can be arranged
to take place at a high enough energy scale, of about one or two orders of
magnitude below the Planck energy; this scale, however, lies just outside the
bounds of our approximations.
