Strong Dynamics and Inflation: a review

Abstract

In this article, we review how strong dynamics can be efficiently employed as a viable alternative to study the mechanism of cosmic inflation. We examine single-field inflation in which the inflaton emerges as a bound state stemming from various strongly interacting field theories. We constrain the number of e-foldings for composite models of inflation in order to obtain a successful inflation. We study a set of cosmological parameters, e.g., the primordial spectral index $n_s$ and tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$, and confront the predicted results with the joint Planck data, and with the recent BICEP2 data.

Comments: revised version: more discussions and references added, 9 figures, 19 pages