Supernatural Inflation: Inflation from Supersymmetry with No (Very) Small Parameters

Most models of inflation have small parameters, either to guarantee sufficient inflation or the correct magnitude of the density perturbations. In this paper we show that, in supersymmetric theories with weak scale supersymmetry breaking, one can construct viable inflationary models in which the requisite parameters appear naturally in the form of the ratio of mass scales that are already present in the theory. Successful inflationary models can be constructed from the flat-direction fields of a renormalizable supersymmetric potential, and such models can be realized even in the context of a simple GUT extension of the MSSM. We evade naive “naturalness” arguments by allowing for more than one field to be relevant to inflation, as in “hybrid inflation” models, and we argue that this is the most natural possibility if inflaton fields are to be associated with flat direction fields of a supersymmetric theory. Such models predict a very low Hubble constant during inflation, of order 10-10 GeV, a scalar density perturbation index n which is very close to or greater than unity, and negligible tensor perturbations. In addition, these models lead to a large spike in the density perturbation spectrum at short wavelengths. ∗Work supported in part by the Department of Energy under cooperative agreement DE-FC0294ER40818, NSF grant PHY89-04035, NSF Young Investigator Award, Alfred Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator Award. †Supported in part by MIT UROP ‡Work supported in part by the Department of Energy under cooperative agreement DE-FC02-