Status of light inflaton: from inflation to laboratory
Niloy Mondal, Shashwat Sharma, Mathew Thomas Arun, Basabendu Barman
hep-ph, astro-ph.CO, hep-th
Submitted: 2026-07-25
Comments: 27 pages, 5 figures, and 2 tables
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We investigate the viability of the light inflaton scenario in light of the latest inflationary constraints from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), together with bounds from collider and
Terminology
Abstract
We investigate the viability of the light inflaton scenario in light of the latest inflationary constraints from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), together with bounds from collider and intensity-frontier experiments searching for a feebly coupled light scalar with a sub-GeV mass. Assuming a quartic inflaton potential, we identify the region of parameter space consistent with the ACT observations and derive constraints on the inflaton mass and inflaton-Higgs mixing using results from NA62, KOTO, BaBar, Belle, LHCb, MATHUSLA, FASER2, SHiP, and neutral meson oscillations. We also explore the prospects for dark matter production during reheating within this framework, while remaining consistent with the inflationary observables.
Sources
- Cosmological Backgrounds of Gravitational Waves
- Lepton collider as a window to reheating via freezing in dark matter detection. Part I
- Lepton collider as a window to reheating via freezing in dark matter detection. Part II
- Light inflaton Hunter's Guide
- Relic Gravity Waves and 7 keV Dark Matter from a GeV scale inflaton
- Heavy Light Inflaton and Dark Matter Production
- Low Scale Inflation at High Energy Colliders and Meson Factories
- Hunting Inflaton at FASER
- From WIMP to FIMP during reheating: collider vs non-collider probes for p-wave annihilation
- Higgs-Inflaton Mixing and Vacuum Stability
- The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 Power Spectra, Likelihoods and $\Lambda$CDM Parameters
- The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 Constraints on Extended Cosmological Models
- Search for the Rare Decay B->K nu nubar
- The Belle II Physics Book
- A Hierarchical Hybrid Learning Framework for Multi-agent Trajectory Prediction
- Search for long-lived scalar particles in $B^+ \to K^+ \chi (\mu^+\mu^-)$ decays
- The Beam and detector of the NA62 experiment at CERN
- Measurement of the very rare $K^+\rightarrow\pi^+\nu\bar{\nu}$ decay
- Long-Lived Particles at the Energy Frontier: The MATHUSLA Physics Case
- Letter of Intent for FASER: ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC
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