Warm Little Inflaton

TL;DR

This paper introduces a warm inflation model where the inflaton, as a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson, sustains a thermal bath through dissipative effects, aligning well with observational data and requiring minimal fields.

Contribution

It presents a novel warm inflation scenario with a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone inflaton, protected from divergences, and compatible with current cosmological observations, using only a few light fields.

Findings

Inflation occurs at finite temperature T>H due to dissipation.

The model aligns with Planck observational results.

It is the first warm inflation model with minimal field content.

Abstract

We show that inflation can naturally occur at a finite temperature T>H that is sustained by dissipative effects, when the inflaton field corresponds to a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson of a broken gauge symmetry. Similarly to "Little Higgs" scenarios for electroweak symmetry breaking, the flatness of the inflaton potential is protected against both quadratic divergences and the leading thermal corrections. We show that, nevertheless, nonlocal dissipative effects are naturally present and are able to sustain a nearly thermal bath of light particles despite the accelerated expansion of the Universe. As an example, we discuss the dynamics of chaotic warm inflation with a quartic potential and show that the associated observational predictions are in very good agreement with the latest Planck results. This model constitutes the first realization of warm inflation requiring only a small number of fields; in particular, the inflaton is directly coupled to just two light fields.