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

TL;DR

This paper investigates composite inflation driven by orientifold field theories, leveraging super Yang-Mills properties and effective theories to explore inflationary dynamics, corrections, and the connection to QCD at high energy scales.

Contribution

It introduces a novel composite inflation model based on orientifold theories, incorporating 1/N and fermion mass corrections, and links it to QCD with implications for inflationary physics.

Findings

Inflation scale around 10^16 GeV.

Model cutoff at the Planck scale.

Inclusion of fermionic and 1/N corrections affects slow-roll parameters.

Abstract

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.