Warm Inflection

Abstract

While ubiquitous in supersymmetric and string theory models, inflationary scenarios near an inflection point in the scalar potential generically require a severe fine-tuning of a priori unrelated supersymmetry breaking effects. We show that this can be significantly alleviated by the inclusion of dissipative effects that damp the inflaton's motion and produce a nearly-thermal radiation bath. We focus on the case where the slow-rolling inflaton directly excites heavy virtual modes that then decay into light degrees of freedom, although our main qualitative results should apply in other regimes. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the minimum amount of dissipation required to keep the temperature of the radiation bath above the Hubble rate during inflation is largely independent of the degree of flatness of the potential, although it depends on the field value at the inflection point. We then discuss the relevance of this result to warm inflation model building.

12 pages, 5 figures. References added. Published version JHEP

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• Electroweak Vacuum Stability in light of BICEP2
• Observational implications of mattergenesis during inflation
• General dissipative coefficient in warm intermediate inflation in loop quantum cosmology in light of Planck and BICEP2
• Inflection-point Higgs Inflation
• Cosmological perturbations in warm-tachyon inflationary universe model with viscous pressure
• Generically large nongaussianity in small multifield inflation