A review of axion inflation in the era of Planck

By E. Pajer, Marco Peloso. 2013

208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Because the inflationary mechanism is extremely sensitive to UV-physics, the construction of theoretically robust models of inflation provides a unique window on Planck scale physics. We review efforts to use an axion with a shift symmetry to ensure a prolonged slow-roll background evolution. The symmetry dictates which operators are allowed, and these in turn determine the observational predictions of this class of models, which include observable gravitational waves (potentially chiral), oscillations in all primordial correlators, specific deviations from scale invariance and Gaussianity and primordial black holes. We discuss the constraints on this class of models in light of the recent Planck results and comment on future perspectives. The shift symmetry is very useful in models of large-field inflation, which typically have monomial potentials, but it cannot explain why two or more terms in the potential are fine-tuned against each other, as needed for typical models of small-field inflation. Therefore some additional symmetries or fine tuning will be needed if forthcoming experiments will constrain the tensor-to-scalar ratio to be r ≲ 0.01.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e5a896cbf53e5fb3884d0662d5f461293559036

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Citations in the corpus

Vector dark matter production at the end of inflation (2018, background): “The latter is generically present in models of axion inflation [5] for which exponential production of gauge bosons has been explored in many studies.”
Gravitational waves at interferometer scales and primordial black holes in axion inflation (2016, background): “4 Axion inflation (for a review, see [21]) is a very natural class of inflationary models [22], as the flatness of the inflaton potential is protected from large quantum corrections by a (softly broken) shift symmetry.”
Primordial black holes from string inflation (2018, background): “Abelian symmetries involves both axions [20], which are associated to compact U(1) factors, and Kähler moduli [21], which are associated with noncompact rescaling symmetries [22].”