Affleck-Dine inflation

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified model where the Affleck-Dine mechanism drives both inflation and baryogenesis, compatible with observational constraints and potentially testable through collider and high-energy physics experiments.

Contribution

The authors demonstrate that a simple Affleck-Dine model with nonminimal gravity coupling can simultaneously explain inflation and baryogenesis, with testable predictions and a fully calculable reheating process.

Findings

Model predicts significant tensor-to-scalar ratio.

Baryon asymmetry generation is consistent with Planck data.

Reheating temperature is explicitly calculable.

Abstract

The Affleck-Dine mechanism in its simplest form provides baryogenesis from the out-of-equilibrium evolution of a complex scalar field with a simple renormalizable potential. We show that such a model, supplemented by nonminimal coupling to gravity, can also provide inflation, consistent with Planck constraints, simultaneously with the generation of the baryon asymmetry. The predictions of the model include significant tensor-to-scalar ratio and possibly baryon isocurvature fluctuations. The reheating temperature is calculable, making the model fully predictive. We require color triplet scalars for reheating and transfering the primordial baryon asymmetry to quarks; these could be observable at colliders. They can also be probed at higher scales by searches for quark compositeness in dijet angular distributions, and flavor-changing neutral current effects.