Physics Letters B 750 (2015) 595–600
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Physics Letters B
www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb
Saddle point inflation from f (R) theory
Michał Artymowski
b,∗
, Zygmunt Lalak
a
, Marek Lewicki
a,c
a
Institute of Theoretical Physics, Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, ul. Pasteura 5, 02-093 Warsaw, Poland
b
Institute of Physics, Jagiellonian University, Łojasiewicza 11, 30-348 Kraków, Poland
c
Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI 48109, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received
2 September 2015
Received
in revised form 28 September
2015
Accepted
30 September 2015
Available
online 3 October 2015
Editor:
M. Cveti
ˇ
c
We analyse several saddle point inflationary scenarios based on power-law f (R) models. We investigate
inflation resulting from f (R) = R + α
n
M
2(1−n)
R
n
+ α
n+1
M
−2n
R
n+1
and f (R) =
l
n
α
n
M
2(1−n)
R
n
as well
as l →∞limit of the latter. In all cases we have found relation between α
n
coefficients and checked
consistency with the PLANCK data as well as constraints coming from the stability of the models in
question. Each of the models provides solutions which are both stable and consistent with PLANCK data,
however only in parts of the parameter space where inflation starts on the plateau of the potential, some
distance from the saddle. And thus all the correct solutions bear some resemblance to the Starobinsky
model.
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP
3
.
1. Introduction
Cosmic inflation [1–3] is a theory of the early universe which
predicts cosmic acceleration and generation of seeds of the large
scale structure of the present universe. It solves problems of classi-
cal
cosmology and it is consistent with current experimental data
[4]. The first theory of inflation was the Starobinsky model [5,6],
which is an f (R) theory [7] with R + R
2
/6M
2
Lagrangian density.
In such a model the acceleration of space–time is generated by
the gravitational interaction itself, without a need to introduce any
new particles or fields. The embedding of Starobinsky inflation in
no-scale SUGRA has been discussed in Ref. [8]. Recently the whole
class of generalisations of the Starobinsky inflation have been dis-
cussed
in the literature [9–15], also in the context of the higher
order terms in Starobinsky Jordan frame potential [16–18].
The
typical scale of inflation is set around the GUT scale, which
is of the order of (10
16
GeV)
4
. Such a high scale of inflation seems
to be a disadvantage of inflationary models. First of all inflation-
ary
physics is very far away from scales which can be measured in
accelerators and other high-energy experiments. The other issue
is, that high scale of inflation enables the production of super-
heavy
particles during the reheating [19]. Those particles could be
in principle heavier than the inflaton itself, so particles like mag-
netic
monopoles, which abundant existence is inconsistent with
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail
address: michal.artymowski@uj.edu.pl (M. Artymowski).
observations, could be produced after inflation. Another argument,
which supports low-scale inflation is the Lyth bound [20], which
is the relation between variation of the inflaton during inflation in
Planck units (denoted as φ) and tensor-to-scalar ratio r, namely
φ
N
0
r
8
dN
, (1)
which for nearly scale-invariant power spectrum gives φ < M
p
for r < 0.002. Small φ seems to be preferable from the point of
view of the naturalness principle, since M
p
is the cut-off scale of
the theory. The value of r determines the scale of inflation, since
V /r (where V is the potential of the inflaton) at the scale of infla-
tion
is set by the normalisation of CMB anisotropies. Therefore in
order to obtain small r one needs a low-scale inflation, which may
be provided by a potential with a saddle point.
A
separate issue related with f (R) inflation is related with loop
corrections to the f (R) function. In order to obtain quasi de Sitter
evolution of space–time one needs a range of energies for which
the R
2
M
−2
term dominates the Lagrangian density. This would re-
quire
all higher order corrections (such as R
3
, R
4
, etc.) [21] to be
suppressed by a mass scale much bigger than M. One naturally
expects all higher order correction to GR to appear at the same
energy scale if one wants to avoid the fine-tuning of coefficients of
all higher order terms. From this perspective it would be better to
generate inflation in f (R) theory without the Starobinsky plateau,
which in principle could be obtained in the saddle point inflation.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2015.09.076
0370-2693/
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by
SCOAP
3
.