Speaker
Description
Axions are well-motivated pseudoscalar fields that arise in many extensions of the Standard Model and can drive inflation. In scenarios where an axion couples to a gauge sector during inflation, the rolling field can lead to exponential amplification of gauge-field fluctuations, with important implications for particle production, reheating dynamics, primordial gravitational wave signatures, and primordial magnetic fields.
In this talk, I will review recent progress in axion inflation with Abelian and non-Abelian gauge fields, emphasizing the resulting signatures in the primordial gravitational wave background and their correlation with primordial magnetic fields. I will further discuss how the emergence of a primordial plasma via the Schwinger effect modifies early universe dynamics, impacting reheating, the gravitational wave signal, and primordial magnetic field predictions.