Inflaton as a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson

In the realistic model of cosmic inflation the inflaton potential should be flat and stable under quantum corrections. It is natural to imagine that there is some symmetry behind and an idea of the inflaton as a Nambu-Goldstone boson of spontaneous breaking of some symmetry has been examined. We give a general formulation of this idea using the non-linear realization of Nambu-Goldstone boson in low-energy effective theory with some explicit symmetry breaking to generate non-trivial potential. The potential is naturally a simple function, typically the mass term of inflaton, and the scenario of "warm inflation" should necessarily be applied under the present observational constraints. We investigate the generation mechanism of necessary thermal dissipation term in inflaton field equation for "warm inflation" without large thermal corrections to inflaton potential. A simple numerical analysis is given to investigate the viability of this scenario. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons .org /licenses /by /4 .0/). Funded by SCOAP3.