Very happy to see my latest preprint with Chiara Cecchini, Mariaveronica De Angelis, William Giarè, and Max Rinaldi finally out on the arXiv - kudos especially to the three younger collaborators (Chiara, Mariaveronica, and William) who did all the heavy-lifting! We studied a theoretically very well-motivated classically scale-invariant inflationary model, quadratic in curvature and featuring a scalar field non-minimally coupled to gravity, where inflation occurs in the transition between two de Sitter regimes, during which dynamical breaking of scale-invariance occurs and the Planck mass emerges. We show that the model is in excellent agreement with current CMB data, and that it makes a highly testable prediction for the amplitude of primordial tensor modes: r≳0.003. Given its very specific predictions, near-future CMB experiments can therefore make or break scale-invariant inflation - we argued that this, in combination with its strong theoretical motivation, makes the model an interesting benchmark to add when studying future tests of inflation from CMB data. You can read our results in the preprint we just posted on arXiv: 2403.04316.
