Related papers: Flat Direction Inflation with Running Kinetic Term…
Supersymmetric hybrid inflation is an exquisite framework to connect inflationary cosmology to particle physics at the scale of grand unification. Ending in a phase transition associated with spontaneous symmetry breaking, it can naturally…
An appealing explanation for the Planck data is provided by inflationary models with a singular non-canonical kinetic term: a Laurent expansion of the kinetic function translates into a potential with a nearly shift-symmetric plateau in…
Multiple axions form a landscape in the presence of various shift symmetry breaking terms. Eternal inflation populates the axion landscape, continuously creating new universes by bubble nucleation. Slow-roll inflation takes place after the…
In this lecture I will review the present status of inflation within string-based brane-world scenarios. The idea is to start from a supersymmetric configuration with two parallel static Dp-branes, and slightly break the supersymmetry…
Non-abelian discrete gauge symmetries can provide the inflaton with a flat potential even when one takes into account gravitational strength effects. The discreteness of the symmetries also provide special field values where inflation can…
An attractive candidate for the inflaton is an axion slowly rolling down a flat potential protected by a perturbative shift symmetry. Realisations of this idea within large field, natural and monomial inflation have been disfavoured by…
Inflation has long been the accepted paradigm for understanding the early universe. Most models of inflation have a scalar field acting as the inflaton particle which decays after inflation during a process called reheating into standard…
We re-examine large scalar fields within effective field theory, in particular focussing on the issues raised by their use in inflationary models (as suggested by BICEP2 to obtain primordial tensor modes). We argue that when the large-field…
We consider the role of supersymmetric flat directions in reheating the Universe after inflation. One or more flat directions can develop large vevs during inflation, which can potentially affect reheating by slowing down scattering…
We construct a chaotic inflation model in which the Higgs fields play the role of the inflaton in the standard model as well as in the singlet extension of the supersymmetric standard model. The key idea is to allow a non-canonical kinetic…
We show that density perturbations seeded by the inflaton can be suppressed when having additional light degrees of freedom contributing to the production of perturbations. The inflaton fluctuations affect the light field dynamics by…
Thermal inflation is an attractive idea to dilute cosmic density of unwanted particles such as moduli fields which cause cosmological difficulties. However, it also dilutes preexisting baryon asymmetry and some viable baryogenesis is…
We propose a class of inflation models in which the coefficient of the inflaton kinetic term rapidly changes with energy scale. This may occur especially if the inflaton moves over a long distance during inflation as in the case of…
We present a field theory solution to the eta problem. By making the inflaton field the phase of a baryon of SU(N_c) supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory we show that all operators that usually spoil the flatness of the inflationary potential…
We consider the gravitational generation of the massive Z-boson field of the standard model, due to the natural breaking of its conformal invariance during inflation. The electroweak symmetry restoration at the end of inflation turns the…
We present a unified model where the same scalar field can drive inflation and account for the present dark matter abundance. This scenario is based on the incomplete decay of the inflaton field into right-handed neutrino pairs, which is…
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…
Using the universal X superfield that measures in the UV the violation of conformal invariance we build up a model of multifield inflation. The underlying dynamics is the one controlling the natural flow of this field in the IR to the…
The distance between BPS branes in string theory corresponds to a flat direction in the effective potential. Small deviations from supersymmetry may lead to a small uplifting of this flat direction and to brane inflation. However, this…
The slow-roll approximation to inflation is ultimately justified by the presence of inflationary attractors for the orbits of the solutions of the dynamical equations in phase space. There are many indications that the inflaton field…