Phenomenology of the minimal inflation scenario: inflationary trajectories and particle production

Abstract

We discuss the phenomenology of the minimal inflation scenario. We concentrate on two aspects: inflationary trajectories and particle production. Our findings can be summarized in two main results: first, that inflationary trayectories that are very flat and provide enough number of e-foldings are natural in the scenario without fine tunning. We present a general formalism toidentify attractors in multi-field inflation regardless of trajectories fulfilling the slow-roll conditions. We then explore particle production inthe model and show how the inflaton naturally transmutes into a dark matter particle. One interesting feature of our model is that it provides a novel mechanism to generate particles and entropy in the universe: the filling of the Fermi sphere up to a given momentum pF due to the sea of goldstinos that are an important part of thematter generated after inflation. With this mechanism in hand we predict that the gravitino should have a mass of > 100−1000 TeV. Another interesting feature of our model is that the predicted level of gravity waves is r = 0.1−0.001, which is in the range of detectability from Planck and upcoming CMB polarization experiments.