Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Riquelme, Simon

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    GENERALIZED NATURAL INFLATION AND THE QUEST FOR COSMIC SYMMETRY BREAKING PATTERNS
    (2018) Riquelme, Simon; Chacko, Zackaria; Wentworth, Richard; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    We present a two-field model that generalizes Natural Inflation, in which the inflaton is the pseudo-Goldstone boson of an approximate symmetry that is spontaneously broken, and the radial mode is dynamical. Within this model, which we designate as ``Generalized Natural Inflation'', we analyze how the dynamics fundamentally depends on the mass of the radial mode and determine the size of the non-Gaussianities arising from such a scenario. We also motivate ongoing research within the coset construction formalism, that aims to clarify how the spontaneous symmetry breaking pattern of spacetime, gauge, and internal symmetries may allow us to get a deeper understanding, and an actual algebraic classification in the spirit of the so-called ``zoology of condensed matter'', of different possible ``cosmic states'', some of which may be quite relevant for model-independent statements about different phases in the evolution of our universe. The outcome of these investigations will be reported elsewhere.