Latest Developments in the Quest for the Unification of Cosmic Inflation and Dark Energy
A special issue of Galaxies (ISSN 2075-4434).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 January 2022) | Viewed by 19235
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue will address the latest developments in the attempt to unify cosmic inflation and dark energy in the Universe.
Dark energy holds the key to the origin and fate of our Universe. When dominant, dark energy forces the expansion of the Universe to accelerate. Observations confirm that accelerated expansion just after the Big Bang explosion (cosmic inflation) set the stage for the Universe’s history, but it is also occurring today. Unifying primordial inflation and current dark energy allows for economic treatment in a common theoretical framework, directly linked with particle physics, constrained by observations of both inflation and late dark energy. Recent developments in the field have enabled this connection to be investigated in novel ways. Because dark energy can be accounted for by a potentially dominated scalar field called quintessence, unifying models have been called quintessential inflation.
Original efforts to construct quintessential inflation found the task daunting. Recent developments, however, offer new ways to efficiently deal with the challenges of unifying inflation with late dark energy. Prominent examples of such new developments in the theory involve the effect of kinetic poles in the scalar potential, direct non-minimal couplings of the scalar field to gravity, so-called disformal couplings or multi-field approaches with non-trivial geometry in configuration space, incorporation of gauge fields in model building and so on. Most such setups are yet to be utilized in a unified explanation of inflation and late dark energy. This effort is underpinned by the reduction in popularity of the concordance model ΛCDM, due to the “swampland conjectures”, as an explanation of late dark energy. Moreover, quintessential inflation may generate a spike in primordial gravitational waves (unlike in usual inflation), soon to be observable by LIGO and/or LISA.
This Special Issue will utilize the latest developments in particle theory to construct and analyze detailed models that address the requirements of early and late acceleration in the Universe expansion in a unified manner. The latest observations will also provide valuable insights into the underlying theory. Moreover, the proposed models will put forward concrete predictions to be put to the observational test but also shed light on the origin and ultimate fate of the Universe.
Dr. Konstantinos Dimopoulos
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- cosmic inflation
- dark energy
- quintessence
- cosmology
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