Desensitizing Inflation from the Planck Scale
  A new mechanism to control Planck-scale corrections to the inflationary eta
parameter is proposed. A common approach to the eta problem is to impose a
shift symmetry on the inflaton field. However, this symmetry has to remain
unbroken by Planck-scale effects, which is a rather strong requirement on
possible ultraviolet completions of the theory. In this paper, we show that the
breaking of the shift symmetry by Planck-scale corrections can be
systematically suppressed if the inflaton field interacts with a conformal
sector. The inflaton then receives an anomalous dimension in the conformal
field theory, which leads to sequestering of all dangerous high-energy
corrections. We analyze a number of models where the mechanism can be seen in
action. In our most detailed example we compute the exact anomalous dimensions
via a-maximization and show that the eta problem can be solved using only
weakly-coupled physics.
