Consistency of inflation and preheating in F(R) supergravity

Understand

We study inflation and preheating in F(R) supergravity characterized by two mass scales of a scalar degree of freedom (scalaron): M (associated with the inflationary era) and m (associated with the preheating era).

• The allowed values of the masses M and m are derived from the amplitude of the CMB temperature anisotropies.
• We show that our model is consistent with the joint observational constraints of WMAP and other measurements in the regime where a sufficient amount of inflation (with the number of e-foldings larger than 50) is realized.
• In the low-energy regime relevant to preheating, we derive the effective scalar potential in the presence of a pseudo-scalar field chi coupled to the inflaton (scalaron) field phi.