Ultraviolet-Protected Inflation

In natural inflation, the inflaton is a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson which acquires a mass by explicit breaking of a global shift symmetry at scale f . In this case, for small field values, the potential is flat and stable under radiative corrections. Nevertheless, slow roll conditions enforce f ≫ M...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Germani, Cristiano, Kehagias, Alex
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2011
País:España
Institución:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repositorio:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:2445/132841
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2445/132841
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Radiació ultraviolada
Bosons
Ultraviolet radiation
Descripción
Sumario:In natural inflation, the inflaton is a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson which acquires a mass by explicit breaking of a global shift symmetry at scale f . In this case, for small field values, the potential is flat and stable under radiative corrections. Nevertheless, slow roll conditions enforce f ≫ M p , making the validity of the whole scenario questionable. In this Letter, we show that a coupling of the inflaton kinetic term to the Einstein tensor allows f ≪ M p by enhancing the gravitational friction acting on the inflaton during inflation. This new unique interaction (a) keeps the theory perturbative in the whole inflationary trajectory, (b) preserves the tree-level shift invariance of the pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson, and (c) avoids the introduction of any new degrees of freedom with respect to standard natural inflation.