F-term axion monodromy inflation

By F. Marchesano, Gary Shiu, A. Uranga. 2014

259 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A bstractThe continuous shift symmetry of axions is at the heart of several realizations of inflationary models. In particular, axion monodromy inflation aims at achieving super-Planckian field ranges for the inflaton in the context of string theory. Despite the elegant underlying principle, explicit models constructed hitherto are exceedingly complicated. We propose a new and better axion monodromy inflationary scenario, where the inflaton potential arises from an F-term. We present several scenarios, where the axion arises from the Kaluza-Klein compactification of higher dimensional gauge fields (or p-form potentials) in the presence of fluxes and/or torsion homology. The monodromy corresponds to a change in the background fluxes, and its F-term nature manifests in the existence of domain walls interpolating among flux configurations. Our scenario leads to diverse inflaton potentials, including linear large field behaviour, chaotic inflation, as well as potentials with even higher powers. They provide an elegant set of constructions with properties in the ballpark of the recent BICEP2 observational data on primordial gravitational waves.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb008aa01525e423b786e58a08ef7c08932c5f8a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Eran Palti
2. D. Baumann
3. S. Vagnozzi
4. Gary Shiu
5. E. Pajer
6. V. Poulin
7. Guido D'Amico
8. Juan García-Bellido

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Eran Palti
2. Gary Shiu
3. S. Vagnozzi
4. D. Baumann
5. A. Uranga
6. E. di Valentino
7. Pablo Soler
8. Luis E Ibáñez

Citations in the corpus

• Exploring cosmic origins with CORE: Inflation (2016, background): “One of the main advances in the field were the first semi-realistic models of large-field inflation in string theory [74, 75] (see also [76, 77]).”
• Relaxion monodromy and the Weak Gravity Conjecture (2015, background): “The 3-form then gets massive by “eating up” the 2-form in a gauge invariant consistent way [18].”
• The landscape of QCD axion models (2020, background): “9) are axion inflation [738–741] where the inflationary potential is given by the standard cosine potential, and axion monodromy [742–744], in which the potential includes extra terms like a linear term.”
• 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].”
• The Swampland: Introduction and Review (2019, background): “And those which use fluxes to do so, see for example [316–325].”
• Fencing in the swampland: quantum gravity constraints on large field inflation (2015, background): “This leads us naturally to the setup discussed in [17], which provided a concrete realization of models proposed in [26, 27].”