Speaker
Mr
David Rodriguez
(King's College London)
Description
We consider the effect of the Gibbons-Hawking radiation on the inflaton in the situation where it is coupled to a large number of spectator fields. We argue that this will lead to two important effects - a thermal contribution to the potential and a gradual change in parameters in the Lagrangian which results from thermodynamic and energy conservation arguments. We present a scenario of hilltop inflation where the field starts trapped at the origin before slowly experiencing a phase transition during which the field extremely slowly moves towards its zero temperature expectation value. We show that it is possible to obtain enough e-folds of expansion as well as the correct spectrum of perturbations without hugely fine-tuned parameters in the potential (albeit with many spectator fields). We also comment on how initial conditions for inflation can arise naturally in this situation.
| What would be the preferred length of your talk? | 10 minutes + questions |
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Primary authors
Mr
David Rodriguez
(King's College London)
Mr
malcolm fairbairn
(kcl)
Mr
tommi markkanen
(imperial)
