On the viability of Locked Inflation

Understand

We review locked inflation and we critically address phenomenological and consistency issues thathave appeared in the literature.

• A natural window of opportunity is found for the original scenario.Moreover, a simple way to enlarge the parameter space is proposed by considering an equivalentlynatural structure for the locking field.
• Finally, an estimate of the amount of topological defects atthe end of inflation is given; due to the low inflationary scale, it turns out to be negligible.