Natural Supergravity inflation

Abstract

We identify a new mechanism in supergravity theories which leads to successful inflation without any need for fine tuning. The simplest model yields a spectrum of density fluctuations tilted away from scale-invariance and negligible gravitational waves. We demonstrate that this is consistent with the observed large-scale structure for a cold dark matter dominated, critical density universe. The model can be tested through measurements of microwave background anisotropy on small angular scales.