Reconciling Inflation with the Festina Lente Bound through Affleck-Dine Baryogenesis

Abstract: The Festina-Lente bound is a swampland conjecture motivated by the behavior of charged BHs in dS spacetime, which imposes a constraint on the masses of charged particles. Although relatively weak in the present-day Universe, it can severely constrain inflation. We clarify its underlying assumptions and show that breaking all gauge symmetries during inflation, with gauge boson masses above the Hubble scale, provides a natural way to evade these constraints. We catalogue single flat directions in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model that completely break its continuous gauge group, together with pairs that achieve complete breaking only when both directions are excited and simultaneously satisfy F- and D-flatness. With suitable lifting operators, such condensates can also generate the baryon asymmetry through the Affleck-Dine mechanism. Within this classification, all single-direction monomials that admit complete breaking carry nonzero $B-L$, providing candidates for Affleck-Dine baryogenesis. We further show that, in this setting, a large condensate compatible with the observed baryon asymmetry and isocurvature constraints readily satisfies the Festina-Lente bound, establishing a natural connection between the FL bound and Affleck-Dine baryogenesis.