Rapid roll inflation with conformal coupling
- Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto, 60 St. George st., Toronto, ON M5S 3H8 (Canada)
- Department of Physics and Research Center for the Early Universe, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033 (Japan)
Usual inflation is realized with a slow rolling scalar field minimally coupled to gravity. In contrast, we consider dynamics of a scalar with a flat effective potential, conformally coupled to gravity. Surprisingly, it contains an attractor inflationary solution with the rapidly rolling inflaton field. We discuss models with the conformal inflaton with a flat potential (including hybrid inflation). There is no generation of cosmological fluctuations from the conformally coupled inflaton. We consider realizations of modulated (inhomogeneous reheating) or curvaton cosmological fluctuations in these models. We also implement these unusual features for the popular string-theoretic warped inflationary scenario, based on the interacting D3-D3 branes. The original warped brane inflation suffers a large inflaton mass due to conformal coupling to 4-dimensional gravity. Instead of considering this as a problem and trying to cure it with extra engineering, we show that warped inflation with the conformally coupled, rapidly rolling inflaton is yet possible with N=37 efoldings, which requires low-energy scales 1-100 TeV of inflation. Coincidentally, the same warping numerology can be responsible for the hierarchy. It is shown that the scalars associated with angular isometries of the warped geometry of compact manifold (e.g. S{sup 3} of Klebanov-Strassler (KS) geometry) have solutions identical to conformally coupled modes and also cannot be responsible for cosmological fluctuations. We discuss other possibilities.
- OSTI ID:
- 21039107
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 77, Issue 4; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.77.043519; (c) 2008 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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