We study the dynamics and observational predictions of warm inflation within a supersymmetric distributed mass model. This dissipative mechanism is well described by the interactions between the inflaton and a tower of chiral multiplets with a mass gap, such that different bosonic and fermionic fields become light as the inflaton scans the tower during inflation. We examine inflation for various mass distributions, analyzing in detail the dynamics and observational predictions. We show, in particular, that warm inflation can be consistently realized in this scenario for a broad parametric range and in excellent agreement with the Planck legacy data. Distributed mass models can be viewed as realizations of the landscape property of string theory, with the mass distributions coming from the underlying spectra of the theory, which themselves would be affected by the vacuum of the theory. We discuss the recently proposed swampland criteria for inflation models on the landscape and analyze the conditions under which they can be met within the distributed mass warm inflation scenario. We demonstrate mass distribution models with a range of consistency with the swampland criteria including cases in excellent consistency.

• Received 5 February 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.103520

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP³.

Published by the American Physical Society