D-term inflation after spontaneous symmetry breaking

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that 1-loop quantum corrections significantly impact D-term hybrid inflation models, especially after spontaneous symmetry breaking, leading to better alignment with observational data like WMAP.

Contribution

It introduces a method to calculate 1-loop corrections outside the inflationary valley and applies it to D-term hybrid inflation, revealing inflation can occur after symmetry breaking.

Findings

Inflation persists after spontaneous symmetry breaking.

Improved agreement with WMAP data.

Reduced cosmic string contribution to CMB anisotropy.

Abstract

We show that 1-loop quantum corrections to the potential energy density in supersymmetric hybrid inflation, outside the inflationary valley, can not be neglected. A method is presented to calculate these 1-loop corrections and they are applied to the case of D-term hybrid inflation, where a significant amount of inflation is shown to occur after spontaneous symmetry breaking. Taking this into account improves the agreement with WMAP measurements. A gauge coupling of up to 0.3 is still consistent with the CMB density perturbation. The spectral index is predicted in between 0.98 and 1.00 and the cosmic string contribution to the CMB anisotropy is sufficiently reduced.