SuperCool Inflation: A Graceful Exit from Eternal Inflation at LHC Scales and Below
arXiv:1111.3629
Abstract
In SuperCool Inflation (SCI), a technically natural and thermal effect gives a graceful exit to old inflation. The Universe starts off hot and trapped in a false vacuum. The Universe supercools and inflates solving the horizon and flatness problems. The inflaton couples to a set of QCD like fermions. When the fermions' non-Abelian gauge group freezes, the Yukawa terms generate a tadpole for the inflaton, which removes the barrier. Inflation ends, and the Universe rapidly reheats. The thermal effect is technically natural in the same way that the QCD scale is technically natural. In fact, Witten used a similar mechanism to drive the Electro-Weak (EW) phase transition; critically, no scalar field drives inflation, which allows SCI to avoid eternal inflation and the measure problem. SCI also works at scales, which can be probed in the lab, and could be connected to EW symmetry breaking. Finally, we introduce a light spectator field to generate density perturbations, which match the CMB. The light field does not affect the inflationary dynamics and can potentially generate non-Gaussianities and isocurvature perturbations observable with Planck.
16 pages, 6 figures
References in corpus (14)
- Echoes of a Hidden Valley at Hadron Colliders
- Discovering New Light States at Neutrino Experiments
- Holographic probabilities in eternal inflation
- A Delicate Universe
- Z' physics with early LHC data
- Eternal Symmetree
- Stationary Measure in the Multiverse
- Eternal inflation predicts that time will end
- Towards a Cosmological Dual to Inflation
- Primordial non-Gaussianity from the 21 cm Power Spectrum during the Epoch of Reionization
- Geometric origin of coincidences and hierarchies in the landscape
- Holographic multiverse and the measure problem
- Lectures on Higgs Boson Physics in the Standard Model and Beyond
- Chain Inflation via Rapid Tunneling in the Landscape