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arXiv · 1407.6010

Inflation Driven by Unification Energy

Mark P. Hertzberg·Frank Wilczek
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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.

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Mark P. Hertzberg, Frank Wilczek. 2014-07-22. Inflation Driven by Unification Energy. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.95.063516

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