Holography of a Composite Inflaton

TL;DR

This paper explores a holographic model of a composite inflaton derived from a strongly coupled gauge theory, analyzing how the gauge coupling's profile influences slow-roll inflation and symmetry breaking.

Contribution

It demonstrates how a D3/D7 brane system with specific backgrounds can model composite Higgs inflation and investigates the impact of gauge coupling profiles on inflation dynamics.

Findings

Holographic dual describes symmetry breaking and inflation dynamics.

Slow roll inflation favored with gentle gauge coupling variation.

Potential realization in walking gauge theories.

Abstract

We study the time evolution of a brane construction that is holographically dual to a strongly coupled gauge theory that dynamically breaks a global symmetry through the generation of an effective composite Higgs vev. The D3/D7 system with a background magnetic field or non-trivial gauge coupling (dilaton) profile displays the symmetry breaking. We study motion of the D7 brane in the background of the D3 branes. For small field inflation in the field theory the effective Higgs vev rolls from zero to the true vacuum value. We study what phenomenological dilaton profile generates the slow rolling needed, hence learning how the strongly coupled gauge theory's coupling must run. We note that evolution of our configuration in the holographic direction, representing the phyiscs of the strong interactions, can provide additional slowing of the roll time. Inflation seems to be favoured if the coupling changes by only a small amount or very gently. We speculate on how such a scenario could be realized away from N=4 gauge theory, for example, in a walking gauge theory.