Compactification driven Hilltop Inflation in Einstein-Yang-Mills

Abstract

Starting from Einstein-Yang-Mills in higher dimensions with an instanton on a compact sphere, we dimensionally reduce to find an effective four-dimensional action describing "hilltop" inflation. Using recent CMB data, we analyse the parameter space of this model to search for viable set-ups. One unique feature of this class of inflationary models is that the value of the inflaton field, or alternatively, the size of the compact sphere, is stabilised dynamically during the inflationary process.