Phys. Rev. D 84, 101301 (2011)

Sometime after the Big Bang, the Universe is thought to have undergone a period of exponential expansion, known as inflation — and thus quantum fluctuations in the early Universe were amplified to seed its present structure. Cosmological data support inflation, but it's proving harder to reconcile with the well-developed and well-tested standard model of particle physics. A particular problem is matching the 'inflaton' — the hypothetical scalar field that would drive inflation — to a scalar field that sits comfortably with particle physics as we know it.

Rouzbeh Allahverdi and colleagues have developed what they consider to be a general prescription for constructing the right kind of potentials for the job. Importantly, the potentials have a desirable quality of 'flatness', have vacuum expectation values that fall below the Planck scale, and can be embedded, without too much fine-tuning, in a version of the standard model that is extended to include supersymmetry. Supersymmetry links integer-spin and half-integer-spin particles, such that every known particle of the standard model is partnered by a 'superparticle'. Evidence of supersymmetry could be found at the Large Hadron Collider.