Little Inflatons and Gauge Inflation

We introduce a new method that allows for the Higgs to be the inflaton. That is, we let the Higgs be a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone (pNG) boson of a global coset symmetry $G/H$ that spontaneously breaks at an energy scale $\sim 4\pi f$ and give it a suitable $SU(2) \subset G$ Chern-Simons interaction, with $\beta$ the dimensionless Chern-Simons coupling strength and $f$ an $SU(2)$ decay constant. As a result, slow-roll inflation occurs via $SU(2)$-induced friction down a steep sinu...

Supergravity is a well-motivated theory beyond the standard model of particle physics, and a suitable arena to study high-energy physics at the early universe including inflation, whose observational evidences are growing more and more. Inflation in supergravity, however, cannot be easily described because of restrictions from supersymmetry (SUSY). The scalar potential has an exponential factor and a large negative term whereas a flat and positive potential is needed to reali...

We present a dynamical cosmological solution that simultaneously accounts for the early inflationary stage of the Universe and solves the supersymmetric little hierarchy problem via the relaxion mechanism. First, we consider an inflationary potential arising from the $D$-term of a new $U(1)$ gauge symmetry with a Fayet--Iliopolous term, that is independent of the relaxion. A technically natural, small $U(1)$ gauge coupling, $g\lesssim 10^{-8}$, allows for a low Hubble scale o...

In [arXiv:1102.1513] we introduced an inflationary scenario, Non-Abelian Gauge Field Inflation or gauge-flation for short, in which slow-roll inflation is driven by non-Abelian gauge field minimally coupled to gravity. We present a more detailed analysis, both numerical and analytical, of the gauge-flation. By studying the phase diagrams of the theory, we show that getting enough number of e-folds during a slow-roll inflation is fairly robust to the choice of initial gauge fi...

In this review, we discuss inflation models based on supergravity. After explaining the difficulties in realizing inflation in the context of supergravity, we show how to evade such difficulties. Depending on types of inflation, we give concrete examples, particularly paying attention to chaotic inflation because the ongoing experiments like Planck might detect the tensor perturbations in near future. We also discuss inflation models in Jordan frame supergravity, motivated by...

We argue, using a phenomenological holographic approach, that walking, strongly coupled gauge theories generate a suitable potential for a small field inflation model. We show that the effective description is a model of a single inflaton. We determine the tunings necessary in the gauge sector to generate inflation and overcome the \eta problem.

We show that in supersymmetry one can obtain inflationary potentials in the observable sector that are sufficiently flat at sub-Planckian field values. Structure of the supersymmetric scalar potential along a flat direction combined with the existence of higher order terms in an effective field theory expansion allows one to find scales below the effective field theory cut off where two or a higher number of the potential derivatives may vanish. As an explicit example, we dem...

Supersymmetric theories often include the non-compact directions in the field space along which the tree level potential grows only up to a certain limited value (determined by the mass scale of the theory) and then stays constant for the arbitrarily large expectation value of the field parametrizing the direction. Above the critical value, the tree-level curvature is large and positive in the other directions. Such plateaux are natural candidates for the hybrid inflaton. The...

We propose a new class of inflationary models in which the scalar field potential governing inflation is generated by the same non-perturbative gauge dynamics that may lead to supersymmetry breaking. Such models satisfy constraints from cosmic microwave background measurements for natural values of the fundamental parameters in the theory. In addition, they have two particularly interesting characteristics: a ``blue'' spectrum of scalar perturbations, and an upper bound on th...

When inflation is driven by a pseudo-scalar field \chi coupled to vectors as \alpha/4 \chi F \tilde F, this coupling may lead to a copious production of gauge quanta, which in turns induces non-Gaussian and non-scale invariant corrections to curvature perturbations. We point out that this mechanism is generically at work in a broad class of inflationary models in supergravity hence providing them with a rich set of observational predictions. When the gauge fields are massless...