Delaying the waterfall transition in warm hybrid inflation

Journal Article · Sat Mar 01 04:00:00 EST 2014 · Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2014/03/023· OSTI ID:22370632

Bastero-Gil, Mar ^[1]; Berera, Arjun; Metcalf, Thomas P. ^[2]

---

1. Departamento de Física Teórica y del Cosmos, Universidad de Granada, Granada, 18071 (Spain)
2. SUPA, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ (United Kingdom)

We analyze the dynamics and observational predictions of supersymmetric hybrid inflation in the warm regime, where dissipative effects are mediated by the waterfall fields and their subsequent decay into light degrees of freedom. This produces a quasi-thermal radiation bath with a slowly-varying temperature during inflation and further damps the inflaton's motion, thus prolonging inflation. As in the standard supercooled scenario, inflation ends when the waterfall fields become tachyonic and can no longer sustain a nearly constant vacuum energy, but the interaction with the radiation bath makes the waterfall fields effectively heavier and delays the phase transition to the supersymmetric minimum. In this work, we analyze for the first time the effects of finite temperature corrections and SUSY mass splittings on the quantum effective potential and the resulting dissipation coefficient. We show, in particular, that dissipation can significantly delay the onset of the tachyonic instability to yield 50–60 e-folds of inflation and an observationally consistent primordial spectrum, which is not possible in the standard supercooled regime when inflation is driven by radiative corrections.

• OSTI ID: 22370632
• Journal Information: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Journal Name: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics Journal Issue: 03 Vol. 2014; ISSN 1475-7516
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGICAL INFLATION
DEGREES OF FREEDOM
INTERACTIONS
MASS
PHASE TRANSFORMATIONS
RADIATIVE CORRECTIONS
SPECTRA
SUPERSYMMETRY
TACHYONS
THERMAL RADIATION