Inflating and Reheating the Universe with an Independent Affine Connection

Abstract

It is shown that a component of the dynamical affine connection, which is independent of the metric, can drive inflation in agreement with observations. This provides a geometrical origin for the inflaton. It is also found that the decays of this field, which has spin 0 and odd parity, into Higgs bosons can reheat the universe up to a sufficiently high temperature.

6 pages, 3 figures; published version

References in corpus (4)

• BICEP / Keck XIII: Improved Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves using Planck, WMAP, and BICEP/Keck Observations through the 2018 Observing Season
• Quantum scale invariance, cosmological constant and hierarchy problem
• Metric-Affine Gravity as an Effective Field Theory
• Dimensional Transmutation in Gravity and Cosmology

Cited by in corpus (20)

• Inflation in Metric-Affine Quadratic Gravity
• Implications of Palatini gravity for inflation and beyond
• Independent connection in ACTion during inflation
• Electroweak vacuum decay in metric-affine gravity
• Increase of $n_s$ in regularized pole inflation & Einstein-Cartan gravity
• Einstein-Cartan pseudoscalaron inflation
• Inflation in Weyl-invariant Einstein-Cartan gravity
• Natural Metric-Affine Inflation
• Inflation and reheating in quadratic metric-affine gravity with derivative couplings
• Scalar induced gravitational waves in metric teleparallel gravity with the Nieh-Yan term
• Starobinsky Inflation and beyond in Einstein-Cartan Gravity
• Introduction to the number of $e$-folds in slow-roll inflation
• General Einstein-Cartan quadratic gravity with derivative couplings
• $\tilde{\xi }$-attractors in metric-affine gravity
• Dynamically induced spin-2 mass in a Weyl-invariant framework
• Toward a gravitational network: Bridging metric-affine gravity and no-scale supergravity
• Cosmic inflation in metric-affine gravity
• Twisting inflation to sub-Planckian axion decay constants
• Inflationary assessment of $F(\mathcal{R},\tilde{\mathcal{R}})$ Einstein-Cartan models
• Reheating in geometric Weyl-invariant Einstein-Cartan gravity