Related papers: Natural Inflation: the status after WMAP 3-year da…
The inflaton field responsible for inflation may not be a canonical fundamental scalar. It is possible that the inflaton is a composite of fermions or it may have a decay width. In these cases the standard procedure for calculating the…
Classic inflation, the theory described in textbooks, is based on the idea that, beginning from typical initial conditions and assuming a simple inflaton potential with a minimum of fine-tuning, inflation can create exponentially large…
A pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson (such as an axion-like particle) is a theoretically well-motivated inflaton as it features a naturally flat potential (natural inflation). This is because Goldstone's theorem protects its potential from…
We investigate inflationary scenarios driven by a class of potentials which are similar in form to those that arise in certain minimal supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. We find that these potentials allow a brief period of…
We describe a method of obtaining the inflationary potential from observations which does not use the slow-roll approximation. Rather, the microwave anisotropy spectrum is obtained directly from a parametrized potential numerically, with no…
We construct a model of inflation based on a low-energy effective theory of spontaneously broken global scale invariance. This provides a shift symmetry that protects the inflaton potential from quantum corrections. Since the underlying…
We present constraints on canonical single-field inflation derived from WMAP five year, ACBAR, QUAD, BICEP data combined with the halo power spectrum from SDSS LRG7. Models with a non-scale-invariant spectrum and a red tilt n_s < 1 are now…
Given the fantastic experimental effort, it is important to thoroughly explore the signature space of inflationary models. The fact that higher derivative operators do not renormalize lower derivative ones allows us to find a large class of…
If the initial state of the inflaton field is taken to have a thermal distribution instead of the conventional zero particle vacuum state then the curvature power spectrum gets modified by a temperature dependent factor such that the…
Pure natural inflation is a compelling effectively single-field model of inflation stemming from a top-down approach to the acceleration mechanism. In this short letter we show that such model is compatible with the latest CMB constraints…
The scale at which supersymmetry is broken and the mechanism by which supersymmetry breaking is fed down to the observable sector has rich implications on the way Nature may have chosen to accomplish inflation. We discuss a simple model for…
We explore the dynamics and observational predictions of the Warm Little Inflaton scenario, presently the simplest realization of warm inflation within a concrete quantum field theory construction. We consider three distinct types of scalar…
Single-field models of inflation are analysed in light of the WMAP five-year data. Assuming instantaneous reheating, we find that modular/new inflation models with small powers in the effective inflaton self-interaction are more strongly…
We derive the requirements that a generic axion-like field has to satisfy in order to play the role of the inflaton field in the warm inflation scenario. Compared to the parameter space in ordinary natural inflation models, we find that the…
The weak gravity conjecture applied for the aligned natural inflation indicates that generically there can be a modulation of the inflaton potential, with a period determined by sub-Planckian axion scale. We study the oscillations in the…
A new inflationary scenario whose exponential potential $V(\Phi)$ has a quadratic dependence on the field $\Phi$ in addition to the standard linear term is confronted with the tree-year observations of the Wilkinson-Microwave Anisotropy…
Inflation, as currently understood, requires the presence of fields with very flat potentials. Supersymmetric models in which supersymmetry breaking is communicated by supergravity naturally yield such fields, but the scales are typically…
Inflation creates perturbations for the large scale structures in the universe, but it also dilutes everything. Therefore it is pertinent that the end of inflation must explain how to excite the Standard Model {\it dof} along with the dark…
We carry out numerical investigations of the perturbations in Nflation models where the mass spectrum is generated by random matrix theory. The tensor-to-scalar ratio and non-gaussianity are already known to take the single-field values,…
We describe the general inflationary dynamics that can arise with a single, canonically coupled field where the inflaton potential is a 4-th order polynomial. This scenario yields a wide range of combinations of the empirical spectral…