Related papers: Warming up cold inflation
We reconsider thermal production of axions in the early universe, including axion couplings to all Standard Model (SM) particles. Concerning the axion coupling to gluons, we find that thermal effects enhance the axion production rate by a…
Variation of constants in the very early universe can generate inflation. We consider a scenario where the strong coupling constant was changing in time and where the gluon condensate underwent a phase transition ending the inflation.
We explore the phenomenology of QCD axion and axion-like particle (ALP) dark matter production via misalignment during inflationary reheating. We investigate scenarios involving inflaton oscillating in a generic potential $\sim \phi^n$,…
We study reheating in $\alpha$-attractor models of inflation in which the inflaton couples to other scalars or fermions. We show that the parameter space contains viable regions in which the inflaton couplings to radiation can be determined…
In this work, we investigate the non-minimally coupled scenario in the context of warm inflation with quantum-corrected self-interacting potential. We transform the potential in the Jordan frame to the Einstein frame and consider a…
The microscopic quantum field theory origins of warm inflation dynamics are reviewed. The warm inflation scenario is first described along with its results, predictions and comparison with the standard cold inflation scenario. The basics of…
Thermal fluctuations provide the main source of large scale density perturbations in warm inflationary models of the early universe. For the first time, general results are obtained for the power spectrum in the case when the friction…
Taking axion inflation as an example, we estimate the maximal temperature ($T_{\rm max}^{ }$) that can be reached in the post-inflationary universe, as a function of the confinement scale of a non-Abelian dark sector ($\Lambda_{\rm IR}^{…
We show that inflation with a quadratic potential occurs naturally in theories where an axion-like field mixes with a 4-form. Such an axion is massive, with the mass which arises from the mixing being protected by the axion shift symmetry.…
In supersymmetric models of warm inflation, the large temperature of the radiation bath produced by the dissipative motion of the inflaton field may induce a significant thermal abundance of potentially dangerous gravitinos. While previous…
The constant-roll inflation is studied where the inflaton is taken as a tachyon field. Since in this approach the second slow-roll parameter is assumed to be of order one instead of being small, then the perturbation parameters will be…
We consider an appealing scenario for the production of purely gravitational dark matter in the background of warm inflation, a mechanism that maintains stable thermal bath during inflation. Through systematic investigation of various…
We study the effects of particle production on the evolution of the inflaton field in an axion monodromy model with the goal of discovering in which situations the resulting dynamics will be consistent with the {\it swampland constraints}.…
The subjects of this thesis are the invisible axion and the more general family of axion-like particles. The invisible axion is a hypothetical elementary particle and a cold dark matter candidate. I present an improved computation of the…
A dissipative mechanism is presented, which emerges in generic interacting quantum field systems and which leads to robust warm inflation. An explicit example is considered, where using typical parameter values, it is shown that…
We revisit the inflection point inflation with an extended discussion to large field values and consider the reheating effects on the inflationary predictions. Parametrizing the reheating dynamics in terms of the reheating temperature and…
A long period of inflation can be triggered when the inflaton is held up on the top of a steep potential by the infrared end of a warped space. We first study the field theory description of such a model. We then embed it in the flux…
Models of cosmic inflation suggest that our universe underwent an early phase of accelerated expansion, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields. Inflationary models make specific, quantitative predictions for several observable…
The QCD axion and an axion-like particle (ALP) are compelling candidates of dark matter. For the QCD axion, it is known that when the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry is spontaneously broken after inflation, the large initial fluctuation can lead…
We present a new model of large field inflation along a winding trajectory in the field space of two axionic fields, where the 'axions' originate from the complex structure moduli sector of a Calabi-Yau 3-fold at large complex structure.…