Chaotic Inflation from the MSSM Along Flat $D$-Term Trajectory

Abstract

Within the MSSM we propose the chaotic inflationary scenario in which the inflaton field is a combination of sleptons and the Higgs field states evolving along the $D$-term flat direction. In the inflation and postinflation reheating processes, a decisive role is played by the MSSM Yukawa superpotential. The vacuum energy during the inflationary era is mainly from the muonic Yukawa coupling, while the inflaton decay and subsequent reheating process dominantly proceeds due to the strange quark Yukawa term. Because of these, the presented scenario is predictive and the results obtained agree well with cosmological observations. In particular, the scalar spectral index and the tensor-to-scalar ratio are respectively, $n_s\simeq 0.966$ and $r=0.00117$. The reheating temperature is found to be $T_r\simeq 7.2\times 10^7$ GeV.