English

Inflaton Effective Potential from Fermions for General $\epsilon$

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2021-06-30 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We accurately approximate the contribution of a Yukawa-coupled fermion to the inflaton effective potential for inflationary geometries with a general first slow roll parameter ϵ(t)\epsilon(t). For ϵ=0\epsilon = 0 our final result agrees with the famous computation of Candelas and Raine done long ago on de Sitter background, and both computations degenerate to the result of Coleman and Weinberg in the flat space limit. Our result contains a small part that depends nonlocally on the inflationary geometry. Even in the numerically larger local part, very little of the ϵ\epsilon dependence takes the form of Ricci scalars. We discuss the implications of these corrections for inflation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.11567,
  title  = {Inflaton Effective Potential from Fermions for General $\epsilon$},
  author = {A. Sivasankaran and R. P. Woodard},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.11567},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

25 pages, 9 figures, uses LaTeX2e. Version 2 (32 pages, 11 figures) substantially revised to provide a detailed comparison between the effective potential and the classical potential, and to explain the tendency for smooth potentials to favor high reheat temperatures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:19:25.456Z