The Hubble Effective Potential

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Hubble Effective Potential, extending the concept to scalar fields proportional to the Hubble parameter, and analyzes quantum effects like symmetry restoration during inflation.

Contribution

It generalizes the effective potential to curved backgrounds with significant curvature effects, providing a new tool for inflationary cosmology analysis.

Findings

Inflationary particle production causes symmetry restoration at late times.

The one-loop Hubble Effective Potential is computed for a massless scalar with arbitrary couplings.

The approach accounts for backgrounds with constant deceleration parameter.

Abstract

We generalize the effective potential to scalar field configurations which are proportional to the Hubble parameter of a homogeneous and isotropic background geometry. This may be useful in situations for which curvature effects are significant. We evaluate the one loop contribution to the Hubble Effective Potential for a massless scalar with arbitrary conformal and quartic couplings, on a background for which the deceleration parameter is constant. Among other things, we find that inflationary particle production leads to symmetry restoration at late times.