Related papers: Pole N-flation
In this note we show that models of natural inflation based on closed string axions are incompatible with the weak gravity conjecture (WGC). Specifically, we use T-duality in order to map the bounds on the charge-to-mass ratio of particles…
We consider "new inflation" inflationary models at small fields, embedded in minimal ${\cal N}=1$ supergravity with a single chiral superfield. Imposing a period of inflation compatible with experiment severely restricts possible models,…
Studies of the initial conditions for inflation have conflicting predictions from exponential suppression to inevitability. At the level of phase space, this conflict arises from the competing intuitions of CPT invariance and…
We study inflation with the most general non-degenerate gravitational action that depends on the symmetric part of the Ricci tensor coupled to a scalar field in the Palatini formulation of gravity. We use field redefinitions to shift the…
We study 2-field inflation models based on the ``large-volume'' flux compactification of type IIB string theory. The role of the inflaton is played by a K\"ahler modulus \tau corresponding to a 4-cycle volume and its axionic partner \theta.…
Inflationary models are usually based on dynamics of one or more scalar fields coupled to gravity. In this work we present a new class of inflationary models, gauge-flation or non-Abelian gauge field inflation, where slow-roll inflation is…
An important unsolved problem that affects practically all attempts to connect string theory to cosmology and phenomenology is how to distinguish effective field theories belonging to the string landscape from those that are not consistent…
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…
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…
We define a general class of superconformal inflationary attractor models studied in our previous papers [1,2], which include, among others, inflationary models of 'induced gravity' which were argued to retain perturbative unitarity up to…
We propose a new construction of the supergravity inflation as an UV completion of the Higgs-$R^2$ inflation. In the dual description of $R^2$-supergravity, we show that there appear dual chiral superfields containing the scalaron or sigma…
We propose a generalisation of the Weak Gravity Conjecture in the presence of scalar fields. The proposal is guided by properties of extremal black holes in ${\cal N}=2$ supergravity, but can be understood more generally in terms of…
We study the possibility of extended inflation in the effective theory of gravity from strings compactified to four dimensions and find that it strongly depends on the mechanism of supersymmetry breaking. We consider a general class of…
We introduce a new class of models of chaotic inflation inspired by the superconformal approach to supergravity. This class of models allows a functional freedom of choice of the inflaton potential V = |f(\phi)|^2. The simplest model of…
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…
The influence of higher-order terms in the K\"{a}hler potential of the supergravity D-term inflation model on the density perturbation is studied. We show that these terms can make the inflaton potential flatter, which lowers the energy…
In view of the recent BICEP2 results [arXiv:1403.3985] which may be attributed to the observation of B-modes polarization of the CMB with tensor-to-scalar ratio $r=0.2_{-0.05}^{+0.07}$, we revisit M-flation model. Gauged M-flation is a…
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…
We investigate inflation models in Jordan frame supergravity, in which an inflaton non-minimally couples to the scalar curvature. By imposing the condition that an inflaton would have the canonical kinetic term in the Jordan frame, we…
I describe a simple class of $\alpha$-attractors, generalizing the single-field GL model of inflation in supergravity. The new class of models is defined for $0<\alpha \lesssim 1$, providing a good match to the present cosmological data. I…