Confronting MSSM flat direction inflation with Planck/BICEP data

TL;DR

This paper investigates MSSM flat direction inflation models with various lifting operators, comparing their predictions with Planck and BICEP data to constrain model parameters and assess their viability.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of inflection point inflation within MSSM, considering multiple lifting operators and confronting models with recent cosmological data.

Findings

Constraints on soft SUSY breaking mass from data

Limits on higher-dimensional operator coefficients

Viability of MSSM flat direction inflation models

Abstract

We study the scenario of inflection point inflation where a flat direction of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) is identified with the inflaton. Specifically, we consider in full generality the cases where a MSSM flat direction is lifted by a higher-dimensional superpotential whose dimension is n = 4, 5, 6, 7, 9. We confront the inflection point inflation scenarios with various n with the Planck and BICEP data, and thereby constrain the soft SUSY breaking mass and the coefficient of the higher-dimensional operator that lifts the flat direction.