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Warm Inflation with the Standard Model

Kim V. Berghaus, Marco Drewes, Sebastian Zell

Abstract

We show for the first time that warm inflation is feasible with Standard Model (SM) gauge interactions alone. Our model consists of a minimal extension of the SM by a single scalar inflaton field with an axion-like coupling to gluons and a monomial potential. The effects of light fermions, which were previously argued to render warm inflation with the SM impossible, are alleviated by Hubble dilution of their chiral chemical potentials. Our model only features one adjustable combination of parameters and accommodates all inflationary observables. We briefly discuss implications for axion experiments, dark matter, and the strong CP-problem.

Warm Inflation with the Standard Model

Abstract

We show for the first time that warm inflation is feasible with Standard Model (SM) gauge interactions alone. Our model consists of a minimal extension of the SM by a single scalar inflaton field with an axion-like coupling to gluons and a monomial potential. The effects of light fermions, which were previously argued to render warm inflation with the SM impossible, are alleviated by Hubble dilution of their chiral chemical potentials. Our model only features one adjustable combination of parameters and accommodates all inflationary observables. We briefly discuss implications for axion experiments, dark matter, and the strong CP-problem.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 22 equations, 1 figure, 1 table.

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: The predictions of warm inflation with the SM for a quartic inflaton potential. The allowed 68$\%$ and 95$\%$ contour regions correspond to the constraints from the combined analysis of Planck Planck:2018jri and BICEP/Keck BICEP:2021xfz data. Proposed and upcoming CMB experiments will improve this bound by about a factor of four (AliCPT Li:2017drrLiu:2025sut, Simons Observatory SimonsObservatory:2018koc, Simons Array POLARBEAR:2015ixw) to twenty (LiteBIRD LiteBIRD:2022cnt, CMB-S4 CMB-S4:2020lpa).