Refining inflation using non-canonical scalars

Observational Constraints on Non-Canonical Inflation

Cobe, Inflation, and Light Scalars

Comparison of the COBE observed quadrupole anisotropy with that predicted in adiabatic CDM models suggests that much of the observed signal may be due to long wavelength gravitational waves. In inflationary models this requires the generation of tensor fluctuations to be at least comparable to scalar density fluctuations. This is feasible, but depends sensitively on the inflaton potential. Alte...

Slow roll in simple non-canonical inflation

We consider inflation using a class of non-canonical Lagrangians for which the modification to the kinetic term depends on the field, but not its derivatives. We generalize the standard Hubble slow roll expansion to the non-canonical case and derive expressions for observables in terms of the generalized slow roll parameters. We apply the general results to the illustrative case of “Slinky” inf...

Hybrid Inflation with Quasi-canonical Supergravity

We construct a hybrid inflationary model associated with the superheavy scale MX ≃ 2 × 1016 GeV of the minimal supersymmetric standard model which is based on the simplest superpotential for symmetry breaking and in which the inflaton potential along the inflationary trajectory is essentially provided by quasi-canonical supergravity. The resulting spectrum of adiabatic density pertubations is b...

Non-Gravitating Scalars and Spacetime Compactification

We discuss role of partially gravitating scalar fields, scalar fields whose energymomentum tensors vanish for a subset of dimensions, in dynamical compactification of a given set of dimensions. We show that the resulting spacetime exhibits a factorizable geometry consisting of usual four-dimensional spacetime with full Poincare invariance times a manifold of extra dimensions whose size and shap...