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Warm Little Inflaton

Mar Bastero-Gil, Arjun Berera, Rudnei O. Ramos, and João G. Rosa
Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 151301 – Published 4 October 2016
Physics logo See Synopsis: Little Higgs Gives Warm Inflaton a Hand

Abstract

We show that inflation can naturally occur at a finite temperature T>H that is sustained by dissipative effects, when the inflaton field corresponds to a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson of a broken gauge symmetry. Similar to the Little Higgs scenarios for electroweak symmetry breaking, the flatness of the inflaton potential is protected against both quadratic divergences and the leading thermal corrections. We show that, nevertheless, nonlocal dissipative effects are naturally present and are able to sustain a nearly thermal bath of light particles despite the accelerated expansion of the Universe. As an example, we discuss the dynamics of chaotic warm inflation with a quartic potential and show that the associated observational predictions are in very good agreement with the latest Planck results. This model constitutes the first realization of warm inflation requiring only a small number of fields; in particular, the inflaton is directly coupled to just two light fields.

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  • Received 5 May 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.151301

© 2016 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

  1. Research Areas
  1. Physical Systems
Particles & FieldsGravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

Synopsis

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Little Higgs Gives Warm Inflaton a Hand

Published 4 October 2016

A concept borrowed from particle physics models called little Higgs gives new strength to the theory of warm inflation.

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Authors & Affiliations

Mar Bastero-Gil1,*, Arjun Berera2,†, Rudnei O. Ramos3,‡, and João G. Rosa4,§

  • 1Departamento de Física Teórica y del Cosmos, Universidad de Granada, Granada-18071, Spain
  • 2School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3FD, United Kingdom
  • 3Departamento de Física Teórica, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 20550-013 Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
  • 4Departamento de Física da Universidade de Aveiro and CIDMA, Campus de Santiago, 3810-183 Aveiro, Portugal

  • *mbg@ugr.es
  • ab@ph.ed.ac.uk
  • rudnei@uerj.br
  • §joao.rosa@ua.pt Also at Departamento de Física e Astronomia, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre 687, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal.

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Issue

Vol. 117, Iss. 15 — 7 October 2016

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