Inflation Driven by Unification Energy

Abstract

We examine the hypothesis that inflation is primarily driven by vacuum energy at a scale indicated by gauge coupling unification. Concretely, we consider a class of hybrid inflation models wherein the vacuum energy associated with a grand unified theory condensate provides the dominant energy during inflation, while a second "inflaton" scalar slow-rolls. We show that it is possible to obtain significant tensor-to-scalar ratios while fitting the observed spectral index.

5 double column pages, 1 figure. V2: Updated to resemble version published in PRD

References in corpus (5)

• BICEP2 I: Detection Of B-mode Polarization at Degree Angular Scales
• String Cosmology: A Review
• Inflation, Symmetry, and B-Modes
• Primordial black hole formation and hybrid inflation
• Density Perturbations in Hybrid Inflation Using a Free Field Theory Time-Delay Approach

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• Flipped GUT Inflation
• Space-Time Quasicrystal Structures and Inflationary and Late Time Evolution Dynamics in Accelerating Cosmology
• Gauge Field Theory Vacuum and Cosmological Inflation without Scalar Field
• Dark matter and Standard Model reheating from conformal GUT inflation