English

Universality of multi-field $\alpha$-attractors

High Energy Physics - Theory 2018-04-10 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We study a particular version of the theory of cosmological α\alpha-attractors with α=1/3\alpha=1/3, in which both the dilaton (inflaton) field and the axion field are light during inflation. The kinetic terms in this theory originate from maximal N=4\mathcal{N}=4 superconformal symmetry and from maximal N=8\mathcal{N}=8 supergravity. We show that because of the underlying hyperbolic geometry of the moduli space in this theory, it exhibits double attractor behavior: their cosmological predictions are stable not only with respect to significant modifications of the dilaton potential, but also with respect to significant modifications of the axion potential: ns12Nn_s\simeq 1-{2\over N}, r4N2r\simeq {4\over N^2}. We also show that the universality of predictions extends to other values of αO(1)\alpha \lesssim {\cal O}(1) with general two-field potentials that may or may not have an embedding in supergravity. Our results support the idea that inflation involving multiple, not stabilized, light fields on a hyperbolic manifold may be compatible with current observational constraints for a broad class of potentials.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.09478,
  title  = {Universality of multi-field $\alpha$-attractors},
  author = {Ana Achúcarro and Renata Kallosh and Andrei Linde and Dong-Gang Wang and Yvette Welling},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.09478},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

26 pages, 9 figures; v2: published version with references added and discussion extended