Related papers: Analytic results in aligned axion inflation

Trapped inflation is a mechanism in which particle production from the moving inflaton is the main source of friction in the inflaton equation of motion. The produced fields source inflaton perturbations, which dominate over the vacuum…

Solid inflation is a cosmological model where inflation is driven by fields which enter the Lagrangian in the same way as body coordinates of a solid matter enter the equation of state, spontaneously breaking spatial translational and…

Natural (axionic) inflation provides a well-motivated and predictive scheme for the description of the early universe. It leads to sizeable primordial tensor modes and thus a high mass scale of the inflationary potential. Naively this seems…

I discuss folded inflation, an inflationary model embedded in a multi-dimensional scalar potential, such as the stringy landscape. During folded inflation, the field point evolves along a path that turns several corners in the potential.…

We study the CMB observables in axion monodromy inflation. These well-motivated scenarios for inflation in string theory have monomial potentials over super-Planckian field ranges, with superimposed sinusoidal modulations from instanton…

We propose a consistent framework with the $U(1)$ Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry for obtaining the initial condition for axion kinetic misalignment from inflation. We introduce a PQ complex scalar field and an extra Higgs doublet, which are…

We study the possibility that the axion Peccei-Quinn symmetry is spontaneously broken after the beginning of inflation. This scenario interpolates between pre-inflationary and post-inflationary axion cosmology with significant…

Inflation in a five-dimensional brane world model with two boundary branes is studied. We make use of the moduli space approximation whereby the low energy theory reduces to a four-dimensional biscalar-tensor gravity plus a minimally…

We study the general multi-axion systems, focusing on the possibility of large field inflation driven by axions. We find that through axion mixing from a non-diagonal metric on the moduli space and/or from St\"uckelberg coupling to a U(1)…

String theory axions are interesting candidates for fields whose potential might be controllable over super-Planckian field ranges and therefore as possible candidates for inflatons in large field inflation. Axion monodromy scenarios are…

We provide type IIB string embeddings of two axion variants of natural inflation. We use a combination of RR 2 form axions as the inflaton field and have its potential generated by non perturbative effects in the superpotential. Besides…

We study a particular supersymmetric realization of the Peccei-Quinn symmetry which provides a suitable candidate for the curvaton field. The class of models considered also solves the mu problem, while generating the Peccei-Quinn scale…

Recent models of axion monodromy inflation in string theory link the inflationary potential and the moduli stabilization potential. Realistic inflationary models require mechanisms to moderately suppress the inflaton mass with respect to…

We study the inflation scenarios, in the framework of superstring theory, where the inflaton is an axion producing the adiabatic curvature perturbations while there exists another light axion producing the isocurvature perturbations. We…

We present a mechanism for realizing hybrid inflation using two axion fields with a purely non-perturbatively generated scalar potential. The structure of scalar potential is highly constrained by the discrete shift symmetries of the…

We consider inflation driven near a saddle point in a higher dimensional field space, which is the most likely type of slow roll inflation on the string theoretical landscape; anthropic arguments need to be invoked in order to find a…

We study tensor modes in pure natural inflation (arXiv:1706.08522), a recently-proposed inflationary model in which an axionic inflaton couples to pure Yang-Mills gauge fields. We find that the tensor-to-scalar ratio r is naturally bounded…

The minimal sub-Planckian axion inflation model accounts for a large scalar-to-tensor ratio via a spiralling trajectory in the field space of a complex field $\Phi$. Here we consider how the predictions of the model are modified by Planck…

We study multi-field inflation in random potentials generated via a non-equilibrium random matrix theory process. We make a novel modification of the process to include correlations between the elements of the Hessian and the height of the…

The hierarchy of fermion masses in the standard model may arise via the breaking of discrete gauge symmetries. The renormalizable interactions of the flavor-symmetry-breaking potential can have accidental global symmetries that are…