Thermal effects on warm chromoinflation

Abstract

We explore a model of a pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson inflaton field coupled to a non-Abelian $SU(2)$ gauge field. This model naturally leads to a warm inflation scenario, where the inflationary dynamics is dominated by thermal dissipation. In this work, we consider a scenario where the inflaton, an axion-like field, is coupled to the $SU(2)$ gauge field, similar to chromoinflation models. Both the inflaton and the gauge field with a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value are coupled to a thermal radiation bath. We demonstrate that the presence of the thermal bath during warm chromoinflation induces a thermal plasma mass for the background gauge field. This thermal mass can significantly disrupt the dynamics of the background gauge field, thereby driving it to its trivial null solution.