Extranatural Flux Inflation

Understand

We propose a new inflation scenario in flux compactification, where a zero mode scalar field of extra components of the higher dimensional gauge field is identified with an inflaton.

• The scalar field is a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson of spontaneously broken translational symmetry in compactified spaces.
• The inflaton potential is non-local and finite, which is protected against the higher dimensional non-derivative local operators by quantum gravity corrections thanks to the gauge symmetry in higher dimensions and the shift symmetry originated from the translation in extra spaces.
• We give an explicit inflation model in a six dimensional scalar QED, which is shown to be consistent with Planck 2018 data.