An ignoble approach to large field inflation
By N. Kaloper, A. Lawrence, L. Sorbo. 2010
315 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study an inflationary model developed by Kaloper and Sorbo, in which the inflaton is an axion with a sub-Planckian decay constant, whose potential is generated by mixing with a topological 4-form field strength. This gives a 4d construction of ``axion monodromy inflation: the axion winds many times over the course of inflation and draws energy from the 4-form. The classical theory is equivalent to chaotic inflation with a quadratic inflaton potential. Such models can produce ``high scale inflation driven by energy densities of the order of (1016GeV)4, which produces primordial gravitational waves potentially accessible to CMB polarization experiments. We analyze the possible corrections to this scenario from the standpoint of 4d effective field theory, identifying the physics which potentially suppresses dangerous corrections to the slow-roll potential. This yields a constraint relation between the axion decay constant, the inflaton mass, and the 4-form charge. We show how these models can evade the fundamental constraints which typically make high-scale inflation difficult to realize. Specifically, the moduli coupling to the axion-four-form sector must have masses higher than the inflationary Hubble scale (1014GeV). There are also constraints from states that become light due to multiple windings of the axion, as happens in explicit string theory constructions of this scenario. Further, such models generally have a quantum-mechanical ``tunneling mode in which the axion jumps between windings, which must be suppressed. Finally, we outline possible observational signatures.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b7c097cd666ea712435ea2119dc0f552a3613fd
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Citations in the corpus
- Relaxion monodromy and the Weak Gravity Conjecture (2015, background): “Hence we have the following consistency condition [42]”
- Towards universal axion inflation and reheating in string theory (2014, result): “reproduces Linde’s model of chaotic inflation [4], which in fact has been shown to be compatible with large field variations in [5–7].”
- Particle production during inflation and gravitational waves detectable by ground-based interferometers (2011, background): “The model of natural chaotic inflation of [30] (see also [31]) leads precisely to this situation: a pseudoscalar inflaton with a quadratic potential.”
- The Swampland: Introduction and Review (2019, methodology): “145), means that it is possible for the system to develop an instability where a membrane is nucleated that reduces the flux by a unit and thereby decreases the potential [337].”
- Fencing in the swampland: quantum gravity constraints on large field inflation (2015, background): “This gives the potential a branching structure with discrete quadratic branches labelled by n [29].”
- Phenomenology of a pseudo-scalar inflaton: naturally large nongaussianity (2011, background): “It may be possible to realize such a potential from axion/4-form mixing, along the lines of [14, 61].”
- Inflation and String Theory (2014, unknown): “57 For related field-theoretic constructions, see [753,754].”
- Gauge Field Production in Axion Inflation: Consequences for Monodromy, non-Gaussianity in the CMB, and Gravitational Waves at Interferometers (2011, background): “The case p = 1 is typical of string theory models [28, 29] while p = 2 arises from axion/4-form mixing [30, 31].”
- F-term axion monodromy inflation (2014, methodology): “This provides a non-perturbative tunneling mechanism [22], which migh possibly destabilize regions of too large axion values.”
- Gauge-preheating and the end of axion inflation (2015, background): “More recently, the observation that a single axion undergoing monodromy can have a small periodicity while ultimately traversing a large field range [16, 17] has seen resurgent interest in axion inflation [18–23].”
- Planck2018 results (2018, background): “3 of PCI15, we next derive constraints on the underlying parameters in axion monodromy inflation (Silverstein & Westphal 2008; McAllister et al. 2010; Kaloper et al. 2011; Flauger et al. 2017a), which within string theory motivates a broad class of inflationary potentials of the form”