Toward Higgs inflation in the MSSM

Adopting a recently proposed single-superfield framework of supergravity inflation, we consider large field inflationary models in which MSSM Higgs-like fields play the role of the inflaton. In the simplest cases, the inflaton potential has a fractional power, which is different from that of the original Higgs inflation, and it can be tested by cosmological observations in near future. We find difficulties in identifying the inflaton with the MSSM Higgses and discuss possible candidates of the inflaton.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure; a contribution to the proceedings of The 2nd Toyama International Workshop on "Higgs as a Probe of New Physics 2015" (HPNP2015), based on a poster presentation given ther

Generalized Pole Inflation: Hilltop, Natural, and Chaotic Inflationary Attractors

A reformulation of inflationary model analyses appeared recently, in which inflationary observables are determined by the structure of a pole in the inflaton kinetic term rather than the shape of the inflaton potential. We comprehensively study this framework with an arbitrary order of the pole taking into account possible additional poles in the kinetic term or in the potential. Depending on the setup, the canonical potential becomes the form of hilltop or plateau models, variants of natural inflation, power-law inflation, or monomial/polynomial chaotic inflation. We demonstrate attractor behaviors of these models and compute corrections from the additional poles to the inflationary observables.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures; v3 published version (minor revision) + additional materials (Figures 1, 4 and Table 1). A one-minute introductory movie is available at https://youtu.be/pLod18Z0EV

The Japan - Australia Partnership in the Era of the East Asian Community - Can they Advance Together?

This paper aims to examine the implications of the rise of East Asian regionalism for the Australia-Japan partnership. In particular, it investigates whether both nations can sustain their partnership, which evolved around Asia Pacific regionalism over the last few decades, by exploring the upsurge of Japans interest in East Asian regionalism and examining characteristics of Australias foreign policy under the Howard government, which lacked a regionalist approach in its first three terms but has shown a keener interest in furthering relations with East Asian countries and promoting East Asian regionalism since late 2004.East Asia, Japan, Australia, foreign policy, Howard government, Regionalism

Functional Factorial K-means Analysis

A new procedure for simultaneously finding the optimal cluster structure of multivariate functional objects and finding the subspace to represent the cluster structure is presented. The method is based on the $k$-means criterion for projected functional objects on a subspace in which a cluster structure exists. An efficient alternating least-squares algorithm is described, and the proposed method is extended to a regularized method for smoothness of weight functions. To deal with the negative effect of the correlation of coefficient matrix of the basis function expansion in the proposed algorithm, a two-step approach to the proposed method is also described. Analyses of artificial and real data demonstrate that the proposed method gives correct and interpretable results compared with existing methods, the functional principal component $k$-means (FPCK) method and tandem clustering approach. It is also shown that the proposed method can be considered complementary to FPCK.Comment: 39 pages, 17 figure