Supersymmetric Inflation from the Fifth Dimension

Understand

We develop a supersymmetric bi-axion model of high-scale inflation coupled to supergravity, in which the axionic structure originates from, and is protected by, gauge symmetry in an extra dimension.

• While local supersymmetry (SUSY) is necessarily Higgsed at high scales during inflation we show that it can naturally survive down to the $\sim$ TeV scale in the current era in order to resolve the electroweak hierarchy problem.
• We show how a suitable inflationary effective potential for the axions can be generated at tree-level by charged fields under the higher-dimensional gauge symmetry.
• The inflationary trajectory lies along the lightest direction in the bi-axion field space, with periodic effective potential and an effective super-Planckian field range emerging from fundamentally sub-Planckian dynamics.