Related papers: Trapped Quintessential Inflation
An alternative to a cosmological constant is quintessence, defined as a slowly-varying scalar field potential V(\phi). If quintessence is observationally significant, an epoch of inflation is beginning at the present epoch, with \phi the…
Single-field models of $\alpha$-attractor quintessential inflation provide a unified picture of the two periods of early- and late-time cosmic acceleration, where both inflation and dark energy are described by a single scalar degree of…
A scalar potential coupled to other fields of large disparate masses will exhibit power suppression of the quantum loop corrections from these massive fields. Quintessence fields in the dark energy regime and inflaton fields during…
This thesis is dedicated to studying cosmological inflation, which is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe that is required to explain the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Inflation, when…
The quintessence field coupled to the cosmic neutrino background (CNB) has been widely discussed as an alternative mechanism to address the coincidence problem. As it is well known, it is possible to extend such models to obtain…
We propose the pure natural quintessential inflation model which is motivated by Witten's conjecture, where the axion couples to pure Yang-Mills $SU(N)$ gauge field at large N limit. This modifies the standard cosine potential which is…
Thermal inflation was proposed as a mechanism to dilute the density of cosmological moduli. Thermal inflation is driven by a complex scalar field possessing a large vacuum expectation value and a very flat potential, called a `flaton'. Such…
We develop general criteria to construct unified frameworks for inflation and quintessence which employ a unique scalar field to drive both. By using such a minimal theoretical framework we avoid having to fine-tune couplings and…
In models of coupled dark energy, in which a dark energy scalar field couples to other matter components, it is natural to expect a coupling to the inflaton as well. We explore the consequences of such a coupling in the context of single…
We investigate in detail a family of quintessential inflation models in the context of $R+R^2$ Palatini modified gravity. We find that successful inflation and quintessence are obtained with an inflaton scalar potential that is…
Inflation models can have an early phase of inflation where the evolution of the inflaton is driven by quantum fluctuations before entering the phase driven by the slope of the scalar field potential. For a Coleman-Weinberg potential this…
We introduce in this paper a new framework for obtaining a period of exponential inflation that is entirely driven by the quadratic kinetic energy of a scalar field. In contrast to recent attempts to realize scalar field inflation without…
It is usually thought that the quintessence as a fundamental scalar field was already present during the inflationary epoch. While there are various models in which the quintessence couples to other species, it is attractive to anticipate a…
Recently Peebles and Vilenkin proposed and quantitatively analyzed the fascinating idea that a substantial fraction of the present cosmic energy density could reside in the vacuum potential energy of the scalar field responsible for…
We propose a simple but effective mechanism to realize an inflationary early universe consistent with the observed WMAP, Planck and/or BICEP2 data, which would be incorporated in various supersymmetric models of elementary particles…
We consider the behaviour of a quintessence field during an inflationary epoch, in order to learn how inflation influences the likely initial conditions for quintessence. We use the stochastic inflation formalism to study quantum…
We propose an idea to build a bridge between reheating and late-time observations in quintessential inflation by backtracking the evolution of the inflaton field from the present time to the end of reheating. This idea is implemented when…
Quintessential inflation models provide a framework that simultaneously describes inflation and dynamical dark energy, the latter of which has recently received growing support from DESI observations. A distinctive feature of these models…
We present a model where the inflaton field behaves like quintessence at late times, generating the present phase of accelerated expansion. This is achieved within the framework of warm inflation, in particular the Warm Little Inflaton…
We study an inflationary scenario where thermal inflation is followed by fast-roll inflation. This is a rather generic possibility based on the effective potentials of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the context of particle physics models.…