Speaker
Mr
Stefan Sandner
(IFIC / CSIC)
Description
I will talk about early Universe inflation driven by an axion-like particle interacting with (non-) Abelian gauge fields. In the case of a non-Abelian gauge group, this can lead to the formation of a stable, homogeneous and isotropic gauge field background. However this only happens significantly after the relevant CMB scales left the horizon. This makes the model practically indistinguishable to Abelian axion inflation -- bringing non-Abelian axion inflation back as a viable inflation candidate.
I will also discuss UV completions of the setup. This leads to significant parameter space restrictions. The remaining parameter space can be divided into three regimes. (i) For small gauge couplings we recover natural inflation. For large gauge couplings the non-Abelian gauge theory either (ii) mimics the Abelian theory over the whole inflationary dynamics or (iii) nonlinear interactions prohibit a linear analysis of the gauge field perturbations.
Primary authors
Mr
Stefan Sandner
(IFIC / CSIC)
Ms
Valerie Domcke
(DESY)
