English

Inflation Driven by Unification Energy

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2017-03-28 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Theory

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1407.6010,
  title  = {Inflation Driven by Unification Energy},
  author = {Mark P. Hertzberg and Frank Wilczek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.6010},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

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

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:10:20.078Z