Thermal effects on warm chromoinflation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how thermal effects influence the dynamics of a chromoinflation model where an axion-like inflaton interacts with an $SU(2)$ gauge field, showing that thermal plasma mass can suppress gauge field activity.

Contribution

It introduces the impact of thermal plasma mass on the gauge field in warm chromoinflation, revealing a mechanism that drives the gauge field to a trivial state.

Findings

Thermal plasma mass can significantly disrupt gauge field dynamics.

The gauge field tends to be driven to a null solution due to thermal effects.

Thermal dissipation dominates the inflationary dynamics in this model.

Abstract

We explore a model of a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson inflaton field coupled to a non-Abelian $SU(2)$ gauge field. This model naturally leads to a warm inflation scenario, where the inflationary dynamics is dominated by thermal dissipation. In this work, we consider a scenario where the inflaton, an axion-like field, is coupled to the $SU(2)$ gauge field, similar to chromoinflation models. Both the inflaton and the gauge field with a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value are coupled to a thermal radiation bath. We demonstrate that the presence of the thermal bath during warm chromoinflation induces a thermal plasma mass for the background gauge field. This thermal mass can significantly disrupt the dynamics of the background gauge field, thereby driving it to its trivial null solution.