Inflation and classical scale invariance

Abstract

BICEP2 measurement of primordial tensor modes in CMB suggests that cosmological inflation is due to a slowly rolling inflaton taking trans-Planckian values and provides further experimental evidence for the absence of large $M_{\rm P}$ induced operators. We show that classical scale invariance solves the problem and allows for a remarkably simple scale-free inflaton model without any gauge group. Due to trans-Planckian inflaton values and VEVs, a dynamically induced Coleman-Weinberg-type inflaton potential of the model can predict tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ in a large range. Precise determination of $r$ in future experiments will allow to test the proposed field-theoretic framework.