Naturally inflating on steep potentials through electromagnetic dissipation

By M. Anber, L. Sorbo. 2009

302 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In models of natural inflation, the inflaton is an axionlike particle. Unfortunately, axion potentials in UV-complete theories appear to be too steep to drive inflation. We show that, even for a steep potential, natural inflation can occur if the coupling between axion and gauge fields is taken into account. Because of this coupling, quanta of the gauge field are produced by the rolling of the axion. If the coupling is large enough, such a dissipative effect slows down the axion, leading to inflation even for a steep potential. The spectrum of perturbations is quasiscale invariant, but in the simplest construction its amplitude is larger than ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}5}$. We discuss a possible way out of this problem.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8cefc8b70de7e941306715fa5dc907660284c95a

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Citations in the corpus

Magnetogenesis from axion inflation (2016, background): “J C A P 1 0 ( 2 0 1 6 ) 0 3 9 been proposed [51, 53].”
Gauge-preheating and the end of axion inflation (2015, methodology): “The expectation values of the quantum fields are well approximated by [29]3”
Science with the space-based interferometer LISA. IV: probing inflation with gravitational waves (2016, background): “The study of scalar perturbations of [98] is based on the approximate equation [101]”
A review of axion inflation in the era of Planck (2013, background): “The mechanism of [48] is constrained by the requirement that backreaction is relevant and that the primordial perturbations match the amplitude inferred from the CMB temperature anisotropies.”
Vector dark matter production at the end of inflation (2018, methodology): “To get further intuition, it is often useful to work with the solution obtained via the WKB approximation [9, 10, 23] which we can write as,”
Primordial gravitational waves for universality classes of pseudoscalar inflation (2016, background): “More precisely, and relevant for small ξ [6]:”
Gravity waves and non-Gaussian features from particle production in a sector gravitationally coupled to the inflaton (2012, background): “Additionally, backreaction effects in such models can assist inflation by dissipating the kinetic energy of the inflaton [43, 52], analogously to warm inflation [34] and trapped inflation [47].”
Recent Progress in the Physics of Axions and Axion-Like Particles (2020, background): “Although here we mainly consider the implications of axion coupling hierarchy for laboratory experiments, we remark that gaγ/gaΛ ∼ Rγ αem/2π or a similar hierarchy between gaΛ and the axion coupling to dark gauge bosons has been exploited in cosmology with various motivations including the magnetoge”
Non-Gaussianities and chiral gravitational waves in natural steep inflation (2012, methodology): “In the present paper we study the nongaussianities and the spectrum of tensor modes in the model [1].”
Inflation and String Theory (2014, background): “In [767], it was shown a successful inflationary period with phenomenologically viable perturbations requires large couplings, αi ∼ O(100), to a large number of gauge fields, N ∼ 10(5).”
Gravitational waves at interferometer scales and primordial black holes in axion inflation (2016, methodology): “26 In this case, one has [69] 〈 ~ E2 + ~ B2〉”
Perturbations in Chromo-Natural Inflation (2013, background): “, [10, 59] to model the strong coupling regime of non-Abelian gauge theory.”