Related papers: Phases of Inflation
We study the onset of the reheating epoch at the end of axion-driven inflation where the axion is coupled to an Abelian, $U(1)$, gauge field via a Chern-Simons interaction term. We focus primarily on $m^2\phi^2$ inflation and explore the…
We study fermions derivatively coupled to axion-like or pseudoscalar fields, and show that the axial vector current of the fermions is not conserved in the limit where the fermion is massless. This apparent violation of the classical chiral…
The effective approach is applied to the analysis of inflationary magnetogenesis. Rather than assuming a particular underlying description, all the generally covariant terms potentially appearing with four space-time derivatives in the…
Treating inflation as an effective theory, we expect the effective Lagrangian to contain higher-dimensional kinetic operators suppressed by the scale of UV physics. When these operators are powers of the inflaton kinetic energy, the scalar…
We search for effective axions with super-Planckian decay constants in type IIB string models. We argue that such axions can be realised as long winding trajectories in complex-structure moduli space by an appropriate flux choice. Our main…
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…
Axion fluctuations generated during inflation lead to isocurvature and non-Gaussian temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Following a previous analysis for the model independent string axion we consider the…
We study the dynamics of axion-like fields in F-theory and suggest that they can serve as inflatons in models of natural inflation. The axions arise from harmonic three-forms on the F-theory compactification space and parameterize a complex…
In this work we investigate the inflationary era in the presence of a canonical scalar field and Chern-Simons parity violating corrections. It was also assumed that a non minimal coupling between curvature and the scalar field is present.…
We prove that inflation is forbidden in the most well understood class of semi-realistic type IIA string compactifications: Calabi-Yau compactifications with only standard NS-NS 3-form flux, R-R fluxes, D6-branes and O6-planes at large…
We study the consistency of large-field inflation in low-energy effective field theories of string theory. In particular, we focus on the stability of K\"ahler moduli in the particularly interesting case where the non-perturbative…
In arXiv:0908.4089, we have proposed a model where natural inflation is realized on a steep potential as a consequence of the interaction of the inflaton with gauge fields through an axion-like coupling. In the present work we study the…
We discuss some model-independent implications of embedding (aligned) axionic inflation in string theory. As a consequence of string theoretic duality symmetries the pure cosine potentials of natural inflation are replaced by modular…
We undertake a systematic study of the $4$-dimensional $SU(N)$ $2$-index chiral gauge theories and investigate their faithful global symmetries and dynamics. These are a finite set of theories with fermions in the $2$-index symmetric and…
We show for the first time that warm inflation is feasible with Standard Model (SM) gauge interactions alone. Our model consists of a minimal extension of the SM by a single scalar inflaton field with an axion-like coupling to gluons and a…
We demonstrate the attractor behavior of inflation driven by a scalar field or a tachyon field in the context of recently proposed four-dimensional effective gravity induced on the world-volume of a three-brane in five-dimensional Einstein…
We propose a mechanism for the natural inflation with and without modulation in the framework of type IIB string theory on toroidal orientifold or orbifold. We explicitly construct the stabilization potential of complex structure, dilaton…
In type IIB Fibre Inflation models the inflaton is a Kaehler modulus which is kinetically coupled to the corresponding axion. In this setup the curvature of the field space induces tachyonic isocurvature perturbations normal to the…
In this paper we examine the IR inflation scenario using the DBI action, where we have $N$ multiple branes located near the tip of a warped geometry. At large $N$ the solutions are similar in form to the more traditional single brane…
We analyze in detail the background cosmological evolution of a scalar field coupled to a massless abelian gauge field through an axial term $\frac{\phi}{f_\gamma} F \tilde{F}$, such as in the case of an axion. Gauge fields in this case are…