Related papers: Inflation by Alignment
The original model of axion natural inflation produces a tensor-to-scalar ratio above the experimental limit. Aligned axion inflation admits inflationary trajectories that originate near a saddle point of the two-field potential, and…
We propose a multi-natural inflation model in which the single-field inflaton potential consists of two or more sinusoidal potentials that are comparable in size, but have different periodicity with a possible non-zero relative phase. The…
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 study models of modular inflation of the form expected to arise from low energy effective actions of superstring theories. We argue on general grounds that the most likely models of modular slow-roll inflation are small field models in…
We propose a landscape of many axions, where the axion potential receives various contributions from shift symmetry breaking effects. We show that the existence of the axion with a super-Planckian decay constant is very common in the axion…
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…
We analyze a model of hybrid natural inflation based on the smallest non-Abelian discrete group S_3. Leading invariant terms in the scalar potential have an accidental global symmetry that is spontaneously broken, providing a…
The hierarchy of fermion masses in the standard model may arise via the breaking of discrete gauge symmetries. The renormalizable interactions of the flavor-symmetry-breaking potential can have accidental global symmetries that are…
A spontaneously broken global discrete symmetry may have pseudo Goldstone modes associated with the spontaneous breaking of the approximate continuous symmetry of the low dimension terms in the Lagrangian. These provide natural candidates…
We present a model with a complex and a real scalar fields and a potential whose symmetry is explicitly broken by Planck-scale physics. For exponentially small breaking, the model accounts for the period of inflation in the early universe…
The continuous shift symmetry of axions is at the heart of several realizations of inflationary models. In particular, axion monodromy inflation aims at achieving super-Planckian field ranges for the inflaton in the context of string…
We extend the Kim-Nilles-Peloso (KNP) alignment mechanism for natural inflation to models with $N>2$ axions, which obtains a super-Planckian effective axion decay constant $f_{\textrm{eff}}\gg M_{Pl}$ through an alignment of the anomaly…
A model of natural inflation with an effectively trans-Planckian decay constant can be easily achieved by the "phase locking" mechanism while keeping field values in the effective field theory within the Planck scale. We give detailed…
We propose a natural inflation model driven by an imaginary or axionic component of a K\"ahler modulus in string-inspired supergravity. The shift symmetry of the axion is gauged under an anomalous $U(1)_X$ symmetry, which leads to a…
We consider here natural inflation in the low energy (two-derivative) metric-affine theory containing only the minimal degrees of freedom in the inflationary sector, i.e. the massless graviton and the pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson (PNGB).…
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…
We consider inflation within a model framework where the Higgs boson arises as a pseudo-Goldstone boson associated with the breaking of a global symmetry at a scale significantly larger than the electroweak one. We show that in such a model…
Natural inflation driven by Pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons have a problem that the nearly scale invariant spectrum of density perturbations is attained only when the symmetry breaking scale is of the order of Planck scale. We show here that…
We study the general multi-axion systems, focusing on the possibility of large field inflation driven by axions. We find that through axion mixing from a non-diagonal metric on the moduli space and/or from St\"uckelberg coupling to a U(1)…
In the so-called natural inflation, an axion-like inflaton is assumed to have a cosine-type periodic potential. This is not the case in a very simple model in which the axion-like inflaton is coupled to an SU(N) (or other) pure Yang-Mills,…