Related papers: Natural Inflation: status after WMAP 3-year data

A pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson, with a potential of the form $ V(\phi) = \Lambda^4 [1 + \cos(\phi/f)]$, can naturally give rise to an epoch of inflation in the early universe (Freese, Frieman, and Olinto 1990). The potential is naturally…

We derive some new constraints on single-field inflation from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe 3-year data combined with the Sloan Luminous Red Galaxy survey. Our work differs from previous analyses by focusing only on the…

The first year WMAP measurement of the CMB temperature anisotropy is intriguingly consistent with a larger running of the inflationary scalar spectral index than would be expected for single-field inflation. We revisit the issue of a large…

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,…

We construct a natural inflation model with the inflaton as a linear combination of the fifth components of Abelian gauge fields in a five-dimensional theory. A seesaw mechanism is introduced to provide a natural milli-charge for matter…

We assay how inflationary models whose properties are dominated by the dynamics of a single scalar field are constrained by cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). We classify…

Recent results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe have been called a corroboration, or even a confirmation, of inflation. Yet, the results include features that require, at least, a significant distortion of what is usually meant…

A model is developed in which the inflaton potential experiences a sudden small change in its second derivative (the effective mass of the inflaton). An exact treatment demonstrates that the resulting density perturbation has a quasi-flat…

We provide an update on five relatively well motivated inflationary models in which the inflaton is a Standard Model singlet scalar field. These include i) the textbook quadratic and quartic potential models but with additional couplings of…

The CMB power spectra are studied for different families of single field new and chaotic inflation models in the effective field theory approach to inflation. We implement a systematic expansion in 1/N_e where N_e ~ 50 is the number of…

Natural inflation is a well-motivated model for the early universe in which an inflaton potential of the pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone form, $V(\phi) = \Lambda^4[1 + \cos{(\phi/f)}]$, can naturally drive a cosmic accelerated epoch. This paper…

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe microwave background data suggest that the primordial spectrum of scalar curvature fluctuations is suppressed at small wavenumbers. We propose a UV/IR mixing effect in small-field inflationary models…

I discuss the current status of inflationary cosmology in light of the recent WMAP 3-year data release. The basic predictions of inflation are all supported by the data. Inflation also makes predictions which have not been well tested by…

Observations of the temperature anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation show that the models of inflation with the monomial potentials are inconsistent with the allowed $n_s-r$ bounds. However certain monomial…

We perform a MCMC (Monte Carlo Markov Chains) analysis of the available CMB and LSS data (including the three years WMAP data) with single field slow-roll new inflation and chaotic inflation models. We do this within our approach to…

We propose a modification of the Natural Inflation (NI) potential in such a way that the spontaneous symmetry breaking scale $f$ can take values less than one (in Planck units). The proposed potential seems simple enough, however, its…

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…

The WMAP results on the scalar spectral index n and its running with scale, though preliminary, open a very interesting window to physics at very high energies. We address the problem of finding inflaton potentials well motivated by…

We propose a multi-natural inflation model in which the single-field inflaton potential consists of two or more sinusoidal potentials that are comparable in size, but have different periodicity with a possible non-zero relative phase. The…

Slow-roll inflation is studied as an effective field theory.We find as consistent form of the inflaton potential V(phi)=N M^4 w(phi/[sqrt{N}M_P]) where phi is the inflaton field, M the inflation energy scale, M_P the Planck mass, and N~50…