Spinodal inflation

Spinodal effect in the natural inflation model

(December 27, 1999) Recently, Cormier and Holman pointed out that fluctuations of an inflaton field φ are significantly enhanced in the model of spinodal inflation with a potential V (φ) for which the second derivative V (φ) changes sign. As an application of this model, we investigate particle production in the natural inflation model with a potential V (φ) = m [1 + cos(φ/f)] by making use of ...

Spinodal instabilities and super-Planckian excursions in natural inflation.

Models such as Natural Inflation that use pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons as the inflaton are attractive for many reasons. However, they typically require trans-Planckian field excursions ΔΦ>MPl, due to the need for an axion decay constant f>MPl to have both a sufficient number of e-folds and values of ns,r consistent with data. Such excursions would in general require the addition of all other h...

Spinodal decomposition in microemulsions

Inflaton and spinodal instability

Motivated by results in exact renormalization group studies, we consider an inflaton model with non-minimal coupling, leading to a potential which evolves with the curvature scalar of the Universe, in a similar way a coarse grained potential evolves with the energy scale. Starting with a symmetry breaking feature, the evolution of the effective potential mimics a Wilsonian flow in energy, and f...

Parallel Spinodal Decomposition

Spinodal decomposition encompasses the ordering dynamics of thermodynamically unstable phases. An example of spinodal decomposition is the separation of the metals in a binary alloy. Because physicists have been unable to develop a fully coherent, consistent , and calculable theory on spinodal decomposition, computational studies have served as valuable sources of information. However, since th...