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. Particularly, I will discuss the first lattice simulations of axion inflation that include the Schwinger effect, i.e. the nonperturbative production of charged particle-antiparticle pairs in the presence of strong gauge fields. I will show that Schwinger production can strongly quench gauge-field growth, making efficient gauge preheating ineffective and significantly suppressing primordial gravitational wave production. These results demonstrate that the Schwinger effect is a crucial ingredient in realistic scenarios of axion inflation with gauge fields, with important implications for both reheating dynamics and observational predictions.
| Other topic / keywords: | inflation, axion, gravitational waves, gauge fields, reheating, early universe |
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