Related papers: Little Inflatons and Gauge Inflation
In Natural Inflation, the Inflaton is a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson which acquires a mass by explicit breaking of a global shift symmetry at scale f. In this case, for small field values, the potential is flat and stable under radiative…
We explore the novel possibility that the inflaton responsible for cosmological inflation is a gauge non-singlet in supersymmetric (SUSY) Grand Unified Theories (GUTs). For definiteness we consider SUSY hybrid inflation where we show that…
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…
We investigate models in which the inflaton emerges as a composite field of a four dimensional, strongly interacting and nonsupersymmetric gauge theory featuring purely fermionic matter. We show that it is possible to obtain successful…
We elaborate on a minimal inflation scenario based entirely on the general properties of supersymmetry breaking in supergravity models. We identify the inflaton as the scalar component of the Goldstino superfield. We write plausible…
We investigate a very general class of cosmological models with scalar fields non-minimally coupled to gravity. A particular representative in this class is given by the non-minimal Higgs inflation model in which the Standard Model Higgs…
It is well known that large Hubble-induced supergravity corrections to the inflaton field can ruin the flatness of the potential, thus creating a tension between slow-roll inflation and supergravity. In this paper we show that it is…
The slow-roll approximation to inflation is ultimately justified by the presence of inflationary attractors for the orbits of the solutions of the dynamical equations in phase space. There are many indications that the inflaton field…
Slow-roll inflation requires the inflaton field to have an exceptionally flat potential, which combined with measurements of the scale of inflation demands some degree of fine-tuning. Alternatively, the flatness of the potential could be…
We construct a new inflation model in which the standard model Higgs boson couples minimally to gravity and acts as the inflaton. Our construction of Higgs inflation incorporates the standard model with Einstein gravity which exhibits…
In [arXiv:1102.1513] we introduced an inflationary scenario, Non-Abelian Gauge Field Inflation or gauge-flation for short, in which slow-roll inflation is driven by non-Abelian gauge field minimally coupled to gravity. We present a more…
We investigate the possibility of inflation with models of antisymmetric tensor field having minimal and nonminimal couplings to gravity. Although the minimal model does not support inflation, the nonminimal models, through the introduction…
We introduce a minimal and yet comprehensive framework with $CP$- and classical scale-symmetries, in order to simultaneously address the hierarchy problem, neutrino masses, dark matter, and inflation. One complex gauge singlet scalar and…
A variant of hybrid inflation which is applicable in a wide class of supersymmetric grand unified models and reproduces the observed temperature perturbations of cosmic background radiation with natural values of the parameters is…
In the context of the Higgs model involving gauge and Yukawa interactions with the spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking, we consider $\lambda \phi^4$ inflation with non-minimal gravitational coupling, where the Higgs field is identified as…
We analyze a model of hybrid natural inflation based on the smallest non-Abelian discrete group S_3. Leading invariant terms in the scalar potential have an accidental global symmetry that is spontaneously broken, providing a…
We study how to obtain a sufficiently flat inflaton potential that is natural from the particle physics point of view. Supersymmetry, which is broken during inflation, cannot protect the potential against non-renormalizable operators…
In this talk, I present the minimal classically scale-invariant and $CP$-symmetric extension of the standard model, containing one additional complex gauge singlet and three flavors of right-handed Majorana neutrinos, incorporated within a…
We show that simple strongly coupled supersymmetric gauge theories with quantum moduli spaces can naturally lead to hybrid inflation. These theories contain no input dimensionful or small parameters. The effective superpotential is linear…
Most models of inflation have small parameters, either to guarantee sufficient inflation or the correct magnitude of the density perturbations. In this paper we show that, in supersymmetric theories with weak scale supersymmetry breaking,…