On Identifying the Present-Day Vacuum Energy with the Potential Driving Inflation

Abstract

There exists a growing body of observational evidence supporting a non-vanishing cosmological constant at the present epoch. We examine the possibility that such a term may arise directly from the potential energy which drove an inflationary expansion of the very early universe. To avoid arbitrary alterations in the shape of this potential at various epochs it is necessary to introduce a time-dependent viscosity into the system. The evolution of the effective Planck mass in scalar-tensor theories is a natural candidate for such an effect. In these models there are observational constraints arising from anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, large-scale galactic structure, observations of the primordial Helium abundance and solar system tests of general relativity. Decaying power law and exponential potentials are considered, but for these models it is very difficult to simultaneously satisfy all of the limits. This may have implications for the joint evolution of the gravitational and cosmological constants.

32 pages of plain latex, FNAL--PUB--93/039-A

Cited by in corpus (13)

• The Cosmological Constant and Dark Energy
• The Cosmological Constant
• Modeling Quintessential Inflation
• Quintessential Inflation with $\alpha$-attractors
• The Curvaton Hypothesis and the eta-problem of Quintessential Inflation, with and without Branes
• Non-minimal gravitational reheating during kination
• The Inflaton Field as Self-Interacting Dark Matter in the Braneworld Scenario
• Low-scale Quintessential Inflation
• Trapped Quintessential Inflation
• Trapped Quintessential Inflation in the context of Flux Compactifications
• Tracking Curvaton(s)?
• Violation of slow-roll in non-minimal inflation
• Curvaton Dynamics in Brane-worlds