Flipped GUT inflation

We analyse the prospects for constructing hybrid models of inflation that provide a dynamical realisation of the apparent closeness between the supersymmetric GUT scale and the possible scale of cosmological inflation. In the first place, we consider models based on the flipped SU(5)×U(1) gauge group, which has no magnetic monopoles. In one model, the inflaton is identified with a sneutrino field, and in the other model it is a gauge singlet. In both cases we find regions of the model parameter spaces that are compatible with the experimental magnitudes of the scalar perturbations, A_s, and the tilt in the scalar perturbation spectrum, n_s, as well as with an indicative upper limit on the tensor-to-scalar perturbation ratio, r. We also discuss embeddings of these models into SO(10), which is broken at a higher scale so that its monopoles are inflated away