Relaxed Inflation

by Tomer Volansky

Wednesday 7 Jun 2017, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Brussels

E/3rd floor-E.349 - Seminar room (E.349) (Marc de Hemptinne (chemin du Cyclotron, 2, Louvain-la-Neuve))

The cosmological relaxation of the electroweak scale has been recently proposed as a mechanism to address the hierarchy problem of the Standard Model. A field, the relaxion, rolls down its potential and, in doing so, scans the squared mass parameter of the Higgs, relaxing it to a parametrically small value. In this talk I will discuss a new scenario in which the relaxion is promoted to an inflaton. By coupling it to Abelian gauge bosons, one introduces the necessary dissipation mechanism which slows down the field in the last stages, and allows for novel reheating dynamics at the end of inflation utilizing the Schwinger mechanism. After reviewing the mechanism, I will discuss the cosmological dynamics of the model and the phenomenological constraints, showing that a cutoff close to the Planck scale, significantly above that of existing models, may be achieved.