Related papers: Natural Inflation with a periodic non-minimal coup…
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…
Supersymmetry is the most natural framework for physics above the TeV scale, and the corresponding framework for early-Universe cosmology, including inflation, is supergravity. No-scale supergravity emerges from generic string…
In a variety of inflation models the motion of the inflaton may trigger the production of some non-inflaton particles during inflation, for example via parametric resonance or a phase transition. Particle production during inflation leads…
We analyze non-minimally coupled scalar field theories in metric (second-order) and Palatini (first-order) formalisms in a comparative fashion. After contrasting them in a general setup, we specialize to inflation and find that the two…
We investigate whether Higgs inflation can occur in the Standard Model starting from natural initial conditions or not. The Higgs has a non-minimal coupling to the Ricci scalar. We confine our attention to the regime where quantum Einstein…
We show that the potential of the scalar field in the Einstein frame is flat if the nonminimal coupling term is properly chosen that it satisfies the condition (V(phi)/K^2(phi)-> constant) as phi gets large. The cosmological implication of…
In the early Universe matter can be described as a conformal invariant ultra-relativistic perfect fluid, which does not contribute, on classical level, to the evolution of the isotropic and homogeneous metric. If we suppose that there is…
Small-field inflation (SFI) is widely considered to be unnatural because an extreme fine-tuning of the initial condition is necessary for sufficiently large e-folding. In this paper, we show that the unnaturally-looking initial condition…
It is a longstanding desire of cosmologists, and particle physicists as well, to connect inflation to low energy physics, culminating, for instance, in what is known as Higgs inflation. The condition for the standard Higgs boson playing the…
Systematic understanding for classes of inflationary models is investigated from the viewpoint of the local conformal symmetry and the slightly broken global symmetry in the framework of the metric-affine geometry. In the metric-affine…
Chromo-natural inflation is a model where non-abelian gauge fields are sustained by the coupling of the axion with the gauge field through the Chern-Simons term. While minimal warm inflation is a model where the axion produces a thermal…
We consider an UV-protected Natural Inflation scenario involving Chern-Simons-like interactions between the inflaton and some beyond the Standard Model gauge fields. The accelerated expansion of the Universe is supported by a combination of…
We study the dynamics of a generalized inflationary model in which both the scalar field and its derivatives are coupled to the gravity. We consider a general form of the nonminimal derivative coupling in order to have a complete treatment…
We construct two simple effective field theory versions of {\it Hybrid Natural Inflation (HNI)} that illustrate the range of its phenomenological implications. The resulting inflationary sector potential, $V=\Delta^4(1+a\cos(\phi/f))$,…
We compute corrections to the inflationary potential due to conformally coupled non-relativistic matter. We find that under certain conditions of the matter coupling, inflation may be interrupted abruptly. We display this in the…
We study warm inflation in the framework of $f(\phi)T$ gravity, where $\phi$ is the inflaton and $T$ is the trace of the energy-momentum tensor. The inflaton field is assumed to roll on the natural potential and the result is analyzed in…
In the context of single field inflation, models with a quadratic potential and models with a natural potential with subplanckian decay constant are in tension with the Planck data. We show that, when embedded in a two-field model with an…
We derive the consistency relations for a chaotic inflation model with a non-minimal coupling to gravity. For a quadratic potential in the limit of a small non-minimal coupling parameter $\xi$ and for a quartic potential without assuming…
In the context of Palatini gravity, $F(R+X)$ models, with X the inflaton kinetic term, are characterized by the appealing property of generating asymptotically flat inflaton potentials, exactly like the more commonly studied Palatini $F(R)$…
Recent ACT data favor a higher scalar spectral index $n_s$, placing models such as $\alpha$-attractor T-models and natural Inflation in tension with current observations. We propose a K-inflation framework with a field-dependent…