The hierarchy of fermion masses in the standard model may arise via the breaking of discrete gauge symmetries. The renormalizable interactions of the flavor-symmetry-breaking potential can have accidental global symmetries that are spontaneously broken, leading to pseudo-Goldstone bosons that may drive inflation. We consider two-field, axion-monodromy inflation models in which the inflaton is identified with a linear combination of pseudo-Goldstone bosons of the flavor sector. We show that the resulting models are nontrivially constrained by current cosmological data as well as the requirements of viable flavor model building.

• Received 4 October 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.92.116011