Related papers: Simple exercises to flatten your potential

The inflationary paradigm has enjoyed phenomenological success, however, a compelling particle physics realization is still lacking. The key obstruction is that the requirement of a suitably flat scalar potential is sensitive to…

Extensions of the Standard Model and general relativity featuring a UV fixed point can leave observable implications at accessible energies. Although mass parameters such as the Planck scale can appear through dimensional transmutation, all…

In negatively curved field spaces, inflation can be realised even in steep potentials. Hyperinflation invokes the `centrifugal force' of a field orbiting the hyperbolic plane to sustain inflation. We generalise hyperinflation by showing…

Any one-field inflation is actually realized in a multifield configuration because the inflaton must have couplings with other fields to reheat the universe and is coupled to all other fields at least gravitationally. In all single inflaton…

Slow-roll inflation is a successful paradigm. However we find that even a small coupling of the inflaton to other light fields can dramatically alter the dynamics and predictions of inflation. As an example, the inflaton can generically…

Inflation is often described through the dynamics of a scalar field, slow-rolling in a suitable potential. Ultimately, this inflaton must be identified as the expectation value of a quantum field, evolving in a quantum effective potential.…

Slow-roll inflation is studied as an effective field theory.We find as consistent form of the inflaton potential V(phi)=N M^4 w(phi/[sqrt{N}M_P]) where phi is the inflaton field, M the inflation energy scale, M_P the Planck mass, and N~50…

We present an effective model where the inflaton is a relaxion that scans the Higgs mass and sets it at the weak scale. The dynamics consist of a long epoch in which inflation is due to the shallow slope of the potential, followed by a few…

We show how we can implement chaotic inflation in the context of supergravity by conveniently selecting the functional form of a strong enough non-minimal coupling between the inflaton and the Ricci scalar curvature. The procedure can be…

Suppression of the scalar power spectrum on large scales is one way to reconcile the tension between Planck and BICEP2 data. This suppression can occur by introducing a phase transition from the fast-roll phase to the slow-roll phase in a…

During hybrid inflation, the slowly-rolling inflaton field has a significant coupling to the trigger field which is responsible for most of the potential. Barring a fine-tuned accidental cancellation, this coupling induces a minimal…

We consider spatially averaged inhomogeneous universe models and argue that, already in the absence of sources, an effective scalar field arises through foliating and spatially averaging inhomogeneous geometrical curvature invariants of the…

Palatini $F(R)$ gravity proved to be a powerful tool in order to realize asymptotically flat inflaton potentials. Unfortunately, it also inevitably implies higher-order inflaton kinetic terms in the Einstein frame that might jeopardize the…

Large field inflation is arguably the simplest and most natural variant of slow-roll inflation. Axion monodromy may be the most promising framework for realising this scenario. As one of its defining features, the long-range polynomial…

The large enhancement of the primordial power spectrum of the curvature perturbation can seed the formation of primordial black hole, that can play as a dark matter component in the Universe. In multi-filed inflation models, the curved…

It is often claimed that the ultra-slow-roll regime of inflation, where the dynamics of the inflaton field are friction dominated, is a non-attractor and/or transient. In this work we carry out a phase-space analysis of ultra-slow roll in…

Extensions of the Standard Model typically contain ``flaton fields" defined as fields with large vacuum expectation values and almost flat potentials where scalar self-coupling is small or vanishes at tree level. Such potentials have been…

In inflationary scenarios with more than one scalar field, inflation may proceed even if each of the individual fields has a potential too steep for that field to sustain inflation on its own. We show that scalar fields with exponential…

It is shown, using quantum field theory in curved spacetime, how the expansion of the universe during inflation produces an aggregate of particles and inflaton vacuum fluctuations at a temperature of 5x10^17GeV and dense enough to make…

We accurately approximate the contribution that photons make to the effective potential of a charged inflaton for inflationary geometries with an arbitrary first slow roll parameter $\epsilon$. We find a small, nonlocal contribution and a…