Extranatural Flux Inflation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel flux inflation model where the inflaton is a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson arising from higher-dimensional gauge fields, with a potential protected by gauge and shift symmetries, compatible with observational data.

Contribution

It presents a new inflation scenario in flux compactification with a protected non-local inflaton potential derived from higher-dimensional gauge symmetry.

Findings

The model is consistent with Planck 2018 data.

The inflaton potential is finite and protected against higher-dimensional operators.

The scenario leverages gauge and shift symmetries for stability.

Abstract

We propose a new inflation scenario in flux compactification, where a zero mode scalar field of extra components of the higher dimensional gauge field is identified with an inflaton. The scalar field is a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson of spontaneously broken translational symmetry in compactified spaces. The inflaton potential is non-local and finite, which is protected against the higher dimensional non-derivative local operators by quantum gravity corrections thanks to the gauge symmetry in higher dimensions and the shift symmetry originated from the translation in extra spaces. We give an explicit inflation model in a six dimensional scalar QED, which is shown to be consistent with Planck 2018 data.