Dante's Waterfall

Abstract

We describe a hybrid axion-monodromy inflation model motivated by the Dante's Inferno scenario. In Dante's Inferno, a two-field potential features a stable trench along which a linear combination of the two fields slowly rolls, rendering the dynamics essentially identical to that of single-field chaotic inflation. A shift symmetry allows for the Lyth bound to be effectively evaded as in other axion-monodromy models. In our proposal, the potential is concave downward near the origin and the inflaton trajectory is a gradual downward spiral, ending at a point where the trench becomes unstable. There, the fields begin falling rapidly towards the minimum of the potential and inflation terminates as in a hybrid model. We find parameter choices that reproduce observed features of the cosmic microwave background, and discuss our model in light of recent results from the BICEP2 and Planck experiments.

16 pages, 8 eps figures

References in corpus (15)

• BICEP2 I: Detection Of B-mode Polarization at Degree Angular Scales
• Hybrid Inflation
• Planck 2013 results. XXII. Constraints on inflation
• Signature of Gravity Waves in Polarization of the Microwave Background
• A Probe of Primordial Gravity Waves and Vorticity
• Gravity Waves and Linear Inflation from Axion Monodromy
• What would we learn by detecting a gravitational wave signal in the cosmic microwave background anisotropy?
• Completing Natural Inflation
• Toward an Understanding of Foreground Emission in the BICEP2 Region
• A joint analysis of Planck and BICEP2 B modes including dust polarization uncertainty
• Dante's Inferno
• The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER)
• Testing Hybrid Natural Inflation with BICEP2
• Spiral Inflation
• A Permutation on Hybrid Natural Inflation

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Productive Interactions: heavy particles and non-Gaussianity
• Drifting Oscillations in Axion Monodromy
• Trajectories with suppressed tensor-to-scalar ratio in Aligned Natural Inflation
• Symmetry Breaking Indication for Supergravity Inflation in Light of the Planck 2015
• Signatures of Planck Corrections in a Spiralling Axion Inflation Model
• Inflation in string theory confronts data/Les modèles d'inflation en théorie des cordes face aux observations
• Spontaneous baryogenesis in spiral inflation
• Multi-field inflation and the field-space metric
• New- vs. chaotic-inflations
• Flavored axion-monodromy inflation
• The (relative) size does not matter in inflation