No Arabic abstract
A seemingly simple question, how does warm inflation exit gracefully?, has a more complex answer than in a cold paradigm. It has been highlighted here that whether warm inflation exits gracefully depends on three independent choices: The form of the potential, the choice of the warm inflation model (i.e., on the form of its dissipative coefficient) and the regime, of weak or strong dissipation, characterizing the warm inflation dynamics. Generic conditions on slow-roll parameters and several constraints on the different model parameters required for warm inflation to exit gracefully are derived.
In this Letter, we describe how a spectrum of entropic perturbations generated during a period of slow contraction can source a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of curvature perturbations on length scales larger than the Hubble radius during the transition from slow contraction to a classical non-singular bounce (the `graceful exit phase). The sourcing occurs naturally through higher-order scalar field kinetic terms common to classical (non-singular) bounce mechanisms. We present a concrete example in which, by the end of the graceful exit phase, the initial entropic fluctuations have become negligible and the curvature fluctuations have a nearly scale-invariant spectrum with an amplitude consistent with observations.
We examine the string cosmology equations with a dilaton potential in the context of the Pre-Big Bang Scenario with the desired scale factor duality, and give a generic algorithm for obtaining solutions with appropriate evolutionary properties. This enables us to find pre-big bang type solutions with suitable dilaton behaviour that are regular at $t=0$, thereby solving the graceful exit problem. However to avoid fine tuning of initial data, an `exotic equation of state is needed that relates the fluid properties to the dilaton field. We discuss why such an equation of state should be required for reliable dilaton behaviour at late times.
Warm inflation is analyzed in the context of Loop Quantum Cosmology (LQC). The bounce in LQC provides a mean through which a Liouville measure can be defined, which has been used previously to characterize the a priori probability for inflation in LQC. Here we take advantage of the tools provided by LQC to study instead the a priori probability for warm inflation dynamics in the context of a monomial quartic inflaton potential. We study not only the question of how a general warm inflation dynamics can be realized in LQC with an appropriate number of e-folds, but also how such dynamics is constrained to be in agreement with the latest cosmic microwave background radiation from Planck. The fraction of warm inflation trajectories in LQC that gives both the required minimum amount e-folds of expansion and also passes through the observational window of allowed values for the tensor-to-scalar ratio and the spectral tilt is explicitly obtained. We find that the probability of warm inflation with a monomial quartic potential in LQC is higher than that of cold inflation in the same context. Furthermore, we also obtain that the a priori probability gets higher as the inherent dissipation of the warm inflation dynamics increases.
We study and estimate probabilistic predictions for the duration of the preinflationary and slow-roll phases after the bounce in loop quantum cosmology, determining how the presence of radiation in the prebounce phase affects these results. We present our analysis for different classes of inflationary potentials that include the monomial power-law chaotic type of potentials, namely, for the quadratic, quartic and sextic potentials and also for a Higgs-like symmetry breaking potential, considering different values for the vacuum expectation value in the latter case. We obtain the probability density function for the number of inflationary e-folds and for other relevant quantities for each model and produce probabilistic results drawn from these distributions. This study allows us to discuss under which conditions each model could eventually lead to observable signatures on the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background, or, else, be also excluded for not predicting a suffcient amount of accelerated expansion. The effect of radiation on the predictions for each model is explicitly quantified. The obtained results indicate that the number of inflationary e-folds in loop quantum cosmology is not a priori an arbitrary number, but can in principle be a predictable quantity, even though the results are dependent on the model and on the amount of radiation in the Universe prior to the start of the inflationary regime.
It has very recently been realized that coupling branes to higher dimensional quantum gravity theories and considering the consistency of what lives on the branes, one is able to understand whether such theories can belong either to the swampland or to the landscape. In this regard, in the present work, we study a warm inflation model embedded in the Randall-Sundrum braneworld scenario. It is explicitly shown that this model belongs to the landscape by supporting a strong dissipative regime with an inflaton steep exponential potential. The presence of extra dimension effects from the braneworld allow achieving this strong dissipative regime, which is shown to be both theoretically and observationally consistent. In fact, such strong dissipation effects, which decrease towards the end of inflation, together with the extra dimension effect, allow the present realization to simultaneously satisfy all previous restrictions imposed on such a model and to evade the recently proposed swampland conjectures. The present implementation of this model, in terms of an exponential potential for the scalar field, makes it also a possible candidate for describing the late-time Universe in the context of a dissipative quintessential inflation model and we discuss this possibility in the Conclusions.