Extranatural Inflation

Nima Arkani-Hamed, Hsin-Chia Cheng, Paolo Creminelli, Lisa Randall
2003 Physical Review Letters  
We present a new model of inflation in which the inflaton is the extra component of a gauge field in a 5d theory compactified on a circle. The chief merit of this model is that the potential comes only from non-local effects so that its flatness is not spoiled by higher dimensional operators or quantum gravity corrections. The model predicts a red spectrum (n ~ 0.96) and a significant production of gravitational waves (r ~ 0.11). We also comment on the relevance of this idea to quintessence.
doi:10.1103/physrevlett.90.221302 pmid:12857303 fatcat:pppqsowzh5eanis7xppocvodk4