Affleck-Dine Inflation

by Jim Cline

Friday 11 Oct 2019, 14:00 → 16:00 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

The Affleck-Dine mechanism is one of oldest and simplest ways of producing the baryon asymmetry, through the evolution of a complex scalar field that carries baryon number.  I will show that the original nonsupersymmetric model, with a renormalizable potential, can also give successful inflation, when supplemented by a nonminimal coupling to gravity.  The baryon asymmetry is generated mostly during inflation rather than afterwards.  Observable tensor perturbations can be produced, as well as baryon isocurvature fluctuations.  A simple extension of the model with color triplet scalars, allowing for perturbative reheating, makes it fully predictive, with no ambiguity in the horizon-crossing epoch.