Inflation With Realistic Supersymmetric SO(10)

Abstract

We implement inflation within a realistic supersymmetric SO(10) model in which the doublet-triplet splitting is realized through the Dimopoulos-Wilczek mechanism, the MSSM $\mu$ problem is resolved, and higgsino mediated dimension five nucleon decay is heavily suppressed. The cosmologically unwanted topological defects are inflated away, and from $\delta T/ T$, the $B-L$ breaking scale is estimated to be of order $10^{16}-10^{17}$ GeV. Including supergravity corrections, the scalar spectral index $n_s = 0.99\pm 0.01$, with $|dn_s/ d{\rm ln}k| \lapproxeq 10^{-3}$.