Relaxed Inflation
Abstract: “The cosmological relaxation of the electroweak scale has been proposed as a mechanism to address the hierarchy problem of the Standard Model. A field, the relaxion, rolls down its potential and scans the squared mass parameter of the Higgs. In the original proposal, the rolling takes place in the background of inflation. In my talk, I discuss a scenario that the relaxion is an inflaton and in addition it couples to to Abelian gauge bosons. This introduces a new dissipation mechanism and allows for reheating at the end of inflation. The reheating mechanism proceeds via the vacuum production of electron-positron pairs, due to the presence of strong electric field. Also I discuss the cosmological dynamics of the model and the phenomenological constraints from CMB and other experiments.”