Related papers: Superconformal Symmetry, NMSSM, and Inflation
In this article we motivate and review the embedding of the gravitationally enhanced friction mechanism in supergravity. The very interesting feature is that inflationary models which utilize this mechanism drive inflation for a wider range…
We demonstrate how to realize within supergravity a novel chaotic-type inflationary scenario driven by the radial parts of a conjugate pair of Higgs superfields causing the spontaneous breaking of a grand unified gauge symmetry at a scale…
We propose a model for cosmic inflation which is based on an effective description of strongly interacting, nonsupersymmetric matter within the framework of dynamical abelian projection and centerization. The underlying gauge symmetry is…
Flat directions in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) can become unstable due to radiative corrections, and the global minimum of the (zero temperature) potential can lie at large values of the squark and/or slepton fields.…
We study the scenario of inflection point inflation where a flat direction of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) is identified with the inflaton. Specifically, we consider in full generality the cases where a MSSM flat…
In supergravity, the dynamics of the sgoldstino -- superpartner of the goldstino superfield associated with the breaking of supersymmetry at low energy -- can substantially modify the dynamics of inflation in the primordial Universe.…
There is solid theoretical and observational motivation behind the idea of scale-invariance as a fundamental symmetry of Nature. We consider a recently proposed classically scale-invariant inflationary model, quadratic in curvature and…
We investigate a very general class of cosmological models with scalar fields non-minimally coupled to gravity. A particular representative in this class is given by the non-minimal Higgs inflation model in which the Standard Model Higgs…
Minimal 5-dimensional supergravity compactified on a circle gives the T$^{3}$ model of $\mathcal{N}=2,d=4$ supergravity, whose duality group is SL$(2,\mathbb{R})$. We study exhaustively the relations between all the local and global…
Global properties of vacuum static, spherically symmetric configurations are studied in a general class of scalar-tensor theories (STT) of gravity in various dimensions. The conformal mapping between the Jordan and Einstein frames is used…
We construct a new $N=4$ non-semisimple gauged supergravity in three dimensions with $E_{6(2)}/SU(6)\times SU(2)$ scalar manifold and $SO(4)\ltimes \mathbf{T}^6$ gauge group. Depending on the values of the gauge coupling constants, the…
In the first part of the thesis we focus on local symmetries. We review a self-consistent framework that we employed in order to discuss the dynamics of the theories of interest. Its merit lies in that we can make the symmetry group act…
We study the cosmology of a toy modified theory of gravity in which gravity shuts off at short distances, as in the fat graviton scenario of Sundrum. In the weak-field limit, the theory is perturbatively local, ghost-free and unitary,…
The scalar potential of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) is nearly flat along many directions in field space. We provide a catalog of the flat directions of the renormalizable and supersymmetry-preserving part of the scalar…
Theories with elementary scalar degrees of freedom seem nowadays required for simple descriptions of the Standard Model and of the Early Universe. It is then natural to embed theories of inflation in supergravity, also in view of their…
We reconsider an inflationary model that inflaton field is non-minimally coupled to gravity. We study parameter space of the model up to the second ( and in some cases third ) order of the slow-roll parameters. We calculate inflation…
Supersymmetry-based hybrid inflation models (referred to as `spontaneously broken supersymmetry' by the Planck collaboration) are attractive for several reasons, including the appealing feature that inflation is associated with local gauge…
In a series of recent papers Kallosh, Linde, and collaborators have provided a unified description of single-field inflation with several types of potentials, ranging from power law to supergravity, in terms of just one parameter $\alpha$.…
We investigate models in which the inflaton emerges as a composite field of a four dimensional, strongly interacting and nonsupersymmetric gauge theory featuring purely fermionic matter. We show that it is possible to obtain successful…
The general form of N=2 supergravity coupled to an arbitrary number of vector multiplets and hypermultiplets, with a generic gauging of the scalar manifold isometries is given. This extends the results already available in the literature in…