TY - JOUR AU - Flauger, Raphael AU - McAllister, Liam AU - Silverstein, Eva AU - Westphal, Alexander TI - Drifting oscillations in axion monodromy JO - Journal of cosmology and astroparticle physics VL - 1710 IS - 10 SN - 1475-7516 CY - London PB - IOP M1 - PUBDB-2017-13763 M1 - SU/ITP-14/29 M1 - SLAC-PUB-16165 M1 - DESY-14-225 M1 - arXiv:1412.1814 SP - 055 PY - 2017 N1 - (c) IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab ; Post referee fulltext in progress; Embargo 12 months from publication AB - We study the pattern of oscillations in the primordial power spectrum in axion monodromy inflation, accounting for drifts in the oscillation period that can be important for comparing to cosmological data. In these models the potential energy has a monomial form over a super-Planckian field range, with superimposed modulations whose size is model-dependent. The amplitude and frequency of the modulations are set by the expectation values of moduli fields. We show that during the course of inflation, the diminishing energy density can induce slow adjustments of the moduli, changing the modulations. We provide templates capturing the effects of drifting moduli, as well as drifts arising in effective field theory models based on softly broken discrete shift symmetries, and we estimate the precision required to detect a drifting period. A non-drifting template suffices over a wide range of parameters, but for the highest frequencies of interest, or for sufficiently strong drift, it is necessary to include parameters characterizing the change in frequency over the e-folds visible in the CMB. We use these templates to perform a preliminary search for drifting oscillations in a part of the parameter space in the Planck nominal mission data. LB - PUB:(DE-HGF)29 ; PUB:(DE-HGF)16 UR - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000414180600003 DO - DOI:10.1088/1475-7516/2017/10/055 UR - https://bib-pubdb1.desy.de/record/398152 ER -