UC Davis

We construct a model of inflation based on a low-energy effective theory of spontaneously broken global scale invariance. This provides a shift symmetry that protects the inflaton potential from quantum corrections. Since the underlying scale invariance is noncompact, arbitrarily large inflaton field displacements are readily allowed in the low-energy effective theory. A weak breaking of scale invariance by almost marginal operators provides a nontrivial inflaton minimum, which sets and stabilizes the final low-energy value of the Planck scale. The underlying scale invariance ensures that the slow-roll approximation remains valid over large inflaton displacements, and yields a scale invariant spectrum of perturbations, as required by the cosmic microwave background observations.