Composite Inflation from Super Yang-Mills, Orientifold and One-Flavor QCD

Recent investigations have shown that inflation can be driven by four-dimensional strongly interacting theories non-minimally coupled to gravity. We explore this paradigm further by considering composite inflation driven by orientifold field theories. The advantage of using these theories resides in the fact that at large number of colors they feature certain super Yang-Mills properties. In particular we can use for inflation the bosonic part of the Veneziano-Yankielowicz effective theory. Furthermore, we include the 1/N as well as fermion mass corrections at the effective Lagrangian level allowing us to explore the effects of these corrections on the inflationary slow-roll parameters. Additionally the orientifold field theory with fermionic matter transforming according to the two-index antisymmetric representation for three colors is QCD. Therefore this model can be interpreted as a new non-minimally coupled QCD theory of inflation. The scale of composite inflation, for all the models presented here, is of the order of $10^{16}$ GeV. Unitarity studies of the inflaton scattering suggest that the cutoff of the model is at the Planck scale.Comment: 17 page

Kernel solutions of the Kostant operator on eight-dimensional quotient spaces

After introducing the generators and irreducible representations of the ${\rm su}(5)$ and ${\rm so}(6)$ Lie algebras in terms of the Schwinger's scillators, the general kernel solutions of the Kostant operators on eight-dimensional quotient spaces ${\rm su}(5)/{\rm su}(4)\times {\rm u}(1)$ and ${\rm so}(6)/{\rm so}(4)\times {\rm so}(2)$ are derived in terms of the diagonal subalgebras ${\rm su}(4)\times {\rm u}(1)$ and ${\rm so}(4)\times {\rm so}(2)$, respectively.Comment: 13 pages. Typos correcte

Inflation from non-minimally coupled scalar field in loop quantum cosmology

The FRW model with non-minimally coupled massive scalar field has been investigated in LQC framework. Considered form of the potential and coupling allows applications to Higgs driven inflation. Out of two frames used in the literature to describe such systems: Jordan and Einstein frame, the latter one is applied. Specifically, we explore the idea of the Einstein frame being the natural 'environment' for quantization and the Jordan picture having an emergent nature. The resulting dynamics qualitatively modifies the standard bounce paradigm in LQC in two ways: (i) the bounce point is no longer marked by critical matter energy density, (ii) the Planck scale physics features the 'mexican hat' trajectory with two consecutive bounces and rapid expansion and recollapse between them. Furthermore, for physically viable coupling strength and initial data the subsequent inflation exceeds 60 e-foldings.Comment: Clarity improved. Replaced with revised version accepted in JCA

Minimal composite inflation

We investigate models in which the inflaton emerges as a composite field of a four dimensional, strongly interacting and nonsupersymmetric gauge theory featuring only fermionic matter. We show that it is possible to obtain successful inflation via non-minimal coupling to gravity, and that the underlying dynamics is preferred to be near conformal. We discover that the compositeness scale of inflation is of the order of the grand unified energy scale. © 2011 IOP Publishing Ltd and SISSA

Composite inflation from super Yang-Mills theory, orientifold, and one-flavor QCD

Recent investigations have shown that inflation can be driven by four-dimensional strongly interacting theories nonminimally coupled to gravity. We explore this paradigm further by considering composite inflation driven by orientifold field theories. The advantage of using these theories resides in the fact that at large number of colors they feature certain super Yang-Mills properties. In particular, we can use for inflation the bosonic part of the Veneziano-Yankielowicz effective theory. Furthermore, we include the 1/N as well as fermion mass corrections at the effective Lagrangian level allowing us to explore the effects of these corrections on the inflationary slow-roll parameters. Additionally, the orientifold field theory with fermionic matter transforming according to the two-index antisymmetric representation for three colors is QCD. Therefore, this model can be interpreted as a new nonminimally coupled QCD theory of inflation. The scale of composite inflation, for all the models presented here, is of the order of 1016 GeV. Unitarity studies of the inflaton scattering suggest that the cutoff of the model is at the Planck scale. © 2012 American Physical Society

Composite inflation setup and glueball inflation

We explore the paradigm in which inflation is driven by a four-dimensional strongly coupled dynamic with a nonminimal coupling to gravity. We introduce a model where the inflaton is identified with the glueball field of a pure Yang-Mills theory. We introduce the dilatonic-like glueball action, which is obtained by requiring saturation of the underlying Yang-Mills trace anomaly at the effective action level. We couple the resulting action nonminimally to gravity. We demonstrate that it is possible to achieve successful inflation with the confining scale of the underlying Yang-Mills theory naturally of the order of the grand unified energy scale. We also argue that the metric formulation gives a more consistent picture for models of composite inflation than the Palatini one. Finally, we show that, within the metric formulation, the model nicely respects tree-level unitarity for the scattering of the inflaton field all the way to the Planck scale. © 2012 American Physical Society