Related papers: Natural Inflation with Hidden Scale Invariance
We study single-field inflation in which the inflaton is identified with the lightest scalar (dilaton) excitation of a confining gauge theory. The inflaton potential is not postulated: it follows from the pure effective Gluodynamics…
We provide a detailed study of natural inflation with a periodic non-minimal coupling, which is a well-motivated inflationary model that admits an explicit UV completion. We demonstrate that this construction can satisfy the most recent…
The physical mechanism responsible for the emergence of primordial cosmic seeds from a perfect isotropic and homogeneous Universe has not been fully addressed in standard cosmic inflation. To handle this shortcoming, D. Sudarsky et al have…
We study chaotic inflation driven by a real, massive, homogeneous minimally coupled scalar field in a flat Robertson-Walker spacetime. The semiclassical limit for gravity is considered, whereas the scalar field is treated quantum…
The induced gravity theory is a variant of Jordan--Brans--Dicke theory where the `dilaton' field possesses a potential. It has the unusual feature that in the presence of a false vacuum there is a {\em stable} static solution with the…
We discuss inflation models within supersymmetry and supergravity frameworks with a landscape of chiral superfields and one $U(1)$ shift symmetry which is broken by non-perturbative symmetry breaking terms in the superpotential. We label…
Recently we have studied in great detail a model of Hybrid Natural Inflation (HNI) by constructing two simple effective field theories. These two versions of the model allow inflationary energy scales as small as the electroweak scale in…
We present an explicit cosmological model where inflation and dark energy both could arise from the dynamics of the same scalar field. We present our discussion in the framework where the inflaton field $\phi$ attains a nearly constant…
We study quantum corrections to an inflationary model, which has the attractive feature of being classically scale-invariant. In this model, quadratic gravity plays along a scalar field in such a way that inflation begins near the unstable…
We consider hybrid inflation for small couplings of the inflaton to matter such that the critical value of the inflaton field exceeds the Planck mass. It has recently been shown that inflation then continues at subcritical inflaton field…
We study the effective field theory of inflation, i.e. the most general theory describing the fluctuations around a quasi de Sitter background, in the case of single field models. The scalar mode can be eaten by the metric by going to…
Quantum gravity computations suggest the existence of an ultraviolet and an infrared fixed point where quantum scale invariance emerges as an exact symmetry. We discuss a particular variable gravity model for the crossover between these…
We describe models of single-field inflation with small and sharp step features in the potential (and sound speed) of the inflaton field, in the context of the Effective Field Theory of Inflation. This approach allows us to study the…
It is conjectured that inflation, taking account of quantum gravity, leads to a discrete spectrum of cosmological perturbations, instead of the continuous Gaussian spectrum predicted by standard field theory in an unquantized background.…
Recent fits of cosmological parameters by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) measurement favor a primordial scalar spectrum with varying index. This result, if stands, could severely constrain inflation model buildings. Most…
We show that a minimal extension of the Standard Model including a new complex scalar field can explain inflation and the observed effective number of neutrinos. The real part of the singlet plays the role of the inflaton field, while the…
The possibility of mass in the context of scale-invariant, generally covariant theories, is discussed. Scale invariance is considered in the context of a gravitational theory where the action, in the first order formalism, is of the form $S…
Cosmological inflation gives a natural answer for a variety of cosmological questions, including the horizon problem, the flatness problem, and others. However, inflation yields new questions relating to the flatness of the inflaton…
We examine a scalar-tensor model of gravity that is globally scale-invariant. When adapted to a spatially flat Robertson-Walker metric, the equations of motion describe a dynamical system that flows from an unstable de Sitter space to a…
The shift-symmetric coupling of a pseudo-scalar particle driving inflation to gauge fields provides a unique way of probing cosmic inflation. We show for an SU(2) gauge group how a classical isotropic background gauge field develops from…