Simple exercises to flatten your potential
By Xi Dong, B. Horn, E. Silverstein, A. Westphal. 2010
204 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We show how backreaction of the inflaton potential energy on heavy scalar fields can flatten the inflationary potential, as the heavy fields adjust to their most energetically favorable configuration. This mechanism operates in previous UV-complete examples of axion monodromy inflation - flattening a would-be quadratic potential to one linear in the inflaton field - but occurs more generally, and we illustrate the effect with several examples. Special choices of compactification minimizing backreaction may realize chaotic inflation with a quadratic potential, but we argue that a flatter potential such as power-law inflation V({phi}) {proportional_to} {phi}{sup p} with p < 2 is a more generic option at sufficiently large values of {phi}.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/869310afdf9924f998f3b8c39af8529731d6e62a
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Citations in the corpus
- Universality class in conformal inflation (2013, background): “4) 1 Other ways of flattening of the inflaton potentials were studied in [18].”
- A review of axion inflation in the era of Planck (2013, background): “In [25] it was argued that potentials that are less convex than quadratic, namely of the form φ with p < 2 as in Eq.”
- Inflation and String Theory (2014, background): “The claim of [532] is that backreaction of localized D3-brane charge, which shifts the moduli vevs, is responsible for the flattening from p = 2 to p = 1.”
- An ignoble approach to large field inflation (2010, methodology): “For large φ, one can find potentials of the form M4−αφα where α < 2 can be a fraction [8, 9, 17].”
- Multi-field conformal cosmological attractors (2013, background): “Other ways of flattening of the inflaton potentials were proposed in [27].”
- The powers of monodromy (2014, methodology): “A key phenomenon is flattening [30], in which the inflationary potential energy density makes a leading contribution to the potential for some”
- Winding out of the Swamp: Evading the Weak Gravity Conjecture with F-term Winding Inflation? (2015, result): “So far we have not included backreaction of Kähler moduli which is expected to lead to a flattening of the inflaton potential [50,28] (see in particular the recent analysis of [43]).”
- The Swampland: Introduction and Review (2019, background): “constrain the proper distance to be sub-Planckian, since it is possible to consider m˝M p. 44Note that backreaction was studied much earlier in the context of attening the eective axion potential in [326]. 127 5 The Emergence Proposal Ideally, we would like to derive the Swampland constraints from s”
- Non-minimal Inflationary Attractors (2013, methodology): “ stretching makes in ation very natural, and leads to universal observational predictions for a very broad class of such models [3]. 1Other ways of attening of the in aton potentials were proposed in [20]. 5 3 Models with arbitrary ˘<0 Now we will consider a generalization of the Jordan frame rep”