Quintessential inflation with a trap and axionic dark matter

Abstract

We study a new model of quintessential inflation which is inspired by supergravity and string theory. The model features a kinetic pole, which gives rise to the inflationary plateau, and a runaway quintessential tail. We envisage a coupling between the inflaton and the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) field which terminates the roll of the runaway inflaton and traps the latter at an enhanced symmetry point (ESP), thereby breaking the PQ symmetry. The kinetic density of the inflaton is transferred to the newly created thermal bath of the hot big bang due to the decay of PQ particles. The model successfully accounts for the observations of inflation and dark energy without any fine-tuning, while also resolving the strong CP problem of QCD and generating axionic dark matter, without isocurvature perturbations. Trapping the inflaton at the ESP ensures that the model does not suffer from the infamous 5th force problem, which typically plagues quintessence.

arXiv commentPublished version, 11 pages, 4 figures

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• Quintessential inflation and cosmological seesaw Mechanism: reheating and observational constraints
• Observable Gravitational Waves from Hyperkination in Palatini Gravity and Beyond
• Non-oscillating Early Dark Energy and Quintessence from Alpha-Attractors
• Attracting the Electroweak Scale to a Tachyonic Trap
• Quintessential inflation and nonlinear effects of the tachyonic trap mechanism
• Reheating constraints and the $H_0$ tension in Quintessential Inflation
• Gravitational particle production of superheavy massive particles in Quintessential Inflation: A numerical analysis
• Pure Natural Quintessential Inflation and Dark Energy
• Kination cosmology from scalar fields and gravitational-wave signatures