Eur. Phys. J. C (2019) 79:1019
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-7538-1
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Tachyonic inflation in loop quantum cosmology
Kui Xiao
a
Department of Science of Mathematics and Physics and Technology of Energy, Hunan Institute of Technology, Hengyang 421002, China
Received: 13 August 2019 / Accepted: 6 December 2019 / Published online: 17 December 2019
© The Author(s) 2019
Abstract A tachyon field might be responsible for cosmo-
logical inflation at an early time and contribute to cosmo-
logical dark matter at a later time. We investigate tachy-
onic inflation by analyzing a tachyon field with different
potentials in the framework of loop quantum cosmology. No
matter which tachyon field energy dominates at the bounce,
the evolution of the background can be divided into three
phases: super-inflation, damping, and slow-roll inflation. The
duration of each phase depends on the initial condition.
During the slow-roll inflation, when the initial condition
is V (T
B
)/ρ
c
≥ 10
−6
, the number of e-folds is very high
(N 60) for V ∝ T
−n
with n = 1 and 1/2. For an expo-
nential potential, to get enough e-folds, V (T
B
)/ρ
c
should be
greater than 7.802 × 10
−4
. Furthermore, the probability of
slow-roll inflation is obtained. We find that the probability of
obtaining slow-roll inflation with 60 or more e-folds is very
close to 1.
1 Introduction
The inflationary paradigm has solved many problems in the
standard model of cosmology [1,2]. Cosmic inflation pro-
vides a means to generate primordial cosmological pertur-
bations [3–5]. The spatial curvature of the universe seeds
the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave back-
ground [6], and it describes the formation of the large-scale
structure of the universe [7]. In a simple inflationary model,
the universe is dominated by a scalar field whose potential
energy dominates over the kinetic energy, and the Hubble
rate is constant during this stage. Evidence shows inflation-
ary theory is an excellent candidate for explaining the very
early universe [6]. However, inflationary theory usually con-
siders a quantum field propagating on a classical spacetime
described by general relativity (GR), which requires con-
sidering the Big Bang singularity. This singularity problem
a
e-mail: 87xiaokui@gmail.com
is considered as a defect of GR on the high-energy scale.
One way to solve this singularity is the quantum theory of
gravity.
There are many approaches to quantum gravity, and some
candidates include bouncing regimes. One of these is loop
quantum cosmology (LQC) [8–10]. LQC is a canonical quan-
tization of homogeneous spacetimes based on techniques
used in loop quantum gravity (LQG) [11–13]. The dynamical
behavior of LQC can be studied effectively by introducing
quantum gravitational corrections to the gravitational and
matter Hamiltonians. In LQC, holonomic corrections lead
to an additional term −ρ
2
/ρ
c
in the Friedmann equation at
high energy [14], where ρ
c
is the maximum matter energy,
which is determined by the quantum effect. The Hubble
parameter reaches zero as the matter energy density reaches
its maximum ρ = ρ
c
, where the quantum bounce occurs.
After the quantum bounce, the cosmology enters a super-
inflation stage dominated by the quantum effect because
1 <ρ/ρ
c
< 1/2. The quantum-modified term in the Fried-
mann equation can be ignored when ρ ρ
c
, and the dynami-
cal behavior of the cosmology is described by GR. The ques-
tion whether the desired slow-roll inflation can occur after
the quantum bounce in LQC has been widely discussed [15–
20]. The simplest inflation model is given by scalar field
theory with slow-roll evolution. Inflation with a canonical
scalar field has been investigated for various potentials such
as quadratic [20–22], Starobinsky [22–26], monodromy [27],
and power-law (φ
n
with n < 2) [28] potentials [29]. Inflation
with a non-canonical scalar field has also been discussed [30–
33]. By considering the pre-inflation dynamical behavior of
the background, one finds that a kinetic-energy-dominated
(KED) bouncing point is more suitable for getting enough
e-foldings during slow-roll inflation regardless of the type of
potential [21,25–28,34].
Tachyonic inflation is an attractive and popular K-inflation
model, where the inflation is achieved with a nonstandard
kinetic term in the inflation Lagrangian. A tachyon conden-
sate with an effective Dirac–Born–Infeld action is an inter-
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