Related papers: Chaotic inflation with four-form couplings
Inflation has long been the accepted paradigm for understanding the early universe. Most models of inflation have a scalar field acting as the inflaton particle which decays after inflation during a process called reheating into standard…
We demonstrate how to realize within supergravity a novel chaotic-type inflationary scenario driven by the radial parts of a conjugate pair of Higgs superfields causing the spontaneous breaking of a grand unified gauge symmetry at a scale…
We present a new mechanism for slow-roll inflation based on higher dimensional supersymmetric gauge theory compactified to four dimensions with twisted (supersymmetry breaking) boundary conditions. These boundary conditions lead to a…
Coupled, multi-field models of inflation can provide several attractive features unavailable in the case of a single inflaton field. These models have a rich dynamical structure resulting from the interaction of the fields and their…
We explore in the supergravity context the possibility that a Higgs scalar may drive inflation via a non-minimal coupling to gravity characterised by a large dimensionless coupling constant. We find that this scenario is not compatible with…
Slow-roll inflation is a successful paradigm. However we find that even a small coupling of the inflaton to other light fields can dramatically alter the dynamics and predictions of inflation. As an example, the inflaton can generically…
We argue that double inflation may occur when a spectator field is non-minimally coupled to gravity. As a concrete example, we study a two-field inflationary model where the initial spectator field is non-minimally coupled to gravity while…
I study two-stage hybrid inflation driven by moduli fields, corresponding to flat directions of supersymmetry, lifted by supergravity corrections. The first stage corresponds to a period of either fast-roll or `locked' inflation, induced by…
Chaotic inflation based on a simple monomial scalar potential, V(phi) ~ phi^p, is an attractive large-field model of inflation capable of generating a sizable tensor-to-scalar ratio r. Therefore, assuming that future CMB observations will…
The general structure of Hybrid Inflation remains a very well-motivated mechanism for lower-scale cosmic inflation in the face of improving constraints on the tensor-to-scalar ratio. However, as originally modeled, the "waterfall" field in…
Inflation driven by a generic self-gravitating medium is an interesting alternative to study the impact of spontaneous spacetime symmetry breaking during a quasi de-Sitter phase, in particular the 4-dimensional diffeomorphism invariance of…
We discuss a new class of tribrid inflation models in supergravity, where the shape of the inflaton potential is dominated by effects from the K\"ahler potential. Tribrid inflation is a variant of hybrid inflation which is particularly…
We study the supergravity hybrid inflation model of Ref.[1] in the presence of a modulus field. The eta-problem is solved by a shift symmetry for the inflaton, which protects the inflaton mass even in the presence of the modulus field.…
I demonstrate that instability in a system of homogeneous scalar fields leads to the growth of super-Hubble metric perturbations. This generalizes the result that parametric resonance can lead to the growth of cosmological perturbations.…
We explore the paradigm according to which inflation is driven by a four-dimensional strongly coupled dynamics coupled non-minimally to gravity. We start by introducing the general setup, both in the metric and Palatini formulation, for…
Although natural inflation is a theoretically well-motivated model for cosmic inflation, it is in tension with recent Planck cosmic microwave background anisotropy measurements. We present a way to alleviate this tension by considering a…
The linear and quadratic perturbations for a scalar-tensor model with non-minimal coupling to curvature, coupling to the Gauss-Bonnet invariant and non-minimal kinetic coupling to the Einstein tensor are developed. The quadratic action for…
We explain why the concept of a spontaneously broken superconformal symmetry is useful to describe inflationary models favored by the Planck. Non-minimal coupling of complex scalars to curvature, N(X, X*) R, is compulsory for superconformal…
The large hierarchy between the Planck scale and the weak scale can be explained by the dynamical breaking of supersymmetry in strongly coupled gauge theories. Similarly, the hierarchy between the Planck scale and the energy scale of…
A model of inflation is presented where the inflaton field is a complex scalar field coupled to a U(1) gauge field. Due to the axial symmetry of the potential, the inflation is driven by the radial direction while the angular field is…