1202.2366 (Peter Adshead et al.)

Chromo-Natural Inflation    [PDF]

Peter Adshead, Mark Wyman

We propose a model for inflation consisting of an axionic scalar field coupled to a set of three non-Abelian gauge fields. Our model's novel requirement is that the gauge fields begin inflation with a rotationally invariant vacuum expectation value (VEV) that is preserved through identification of SU(2) gauge invariance with rotations in three dimensions. The gauge VEV interacts with the background value of the axion, leading to an attractor solution that exhibits slow roll inflation even when the axion decay constant has a natural value ($View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2366