Strong Dynamics and Inflation: a review

TL;DR

This review discusses how strong dynamics can serve as an alternative framework for cosmic inflation, focusing on composite inflaton models and their compatibility with observational data.

Contribution

It synthesizes current research on composite inflation models derived from strongly interacting theories and compares their predictions with recent cosmological observations.

Findings

Constraints on the number of e-foldings for successful composite inflation

Predicted spectral index and tensor-to-scalar ratio consistent with Planck and BICEP2 data

Assessment of strong dynamics as a viable inflationary mechanism

Abstract

In this article, we review how strong dynamics can be efficiently employed as a viable alternative to study the mechanism of cosmic inflation. We examine single-field inflation in which the inflaton emerges as a bound state stemming from various strongly interacting field theories. We constrain the number of e-foldings for composite models of inflation in order to obtain a successful inflation. We study a set of cosmological parameters, e.g., the primordial spectral index $n_{s}$ and tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$, and confront the predicted results with the joint Planck data, and with the recent BICEP2 data.