Power suppression from disparate mass scales in effective scalar field theories of inflation and quintessence

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that large mass disparities in scalar field theories of inflation and quintessence lead to power suppression of quantum corrections from massive fields, affecting model building and the role of these fields in cosmology.

Contribution

It develops a quantitative framework using the decoupling theorem to analyze suppression effects in scalar potentials with large mass disparities, applicable to inflation and dark energy models.

Findings

Quantum corrections from massive fields are suppressed by power laws.

Decoupling allows for larger couplings without destabilizing potentials.

Implications for the role of quintessence and inflaton fields in particle physics and cosmology.

Abstract

A scalar potential coupled to other fields of large disparate masses will exhibit power suppression of the quantum loop corrections from these massive fields. Quintessence fields in the dark energy regime and inflaton fields during inflation often have a very large background field value. Thus any other field with its mass dependent on the quintessence/inflaton background field value through a moderate coupling will become very massive during the dark energy/inflation phase and its quantum corrections to the scalar effective potential will be suppressed. This concept is developed in this paper using the decoupling theorem. The problem then reduces to a quantitative question of the size of suppression effects within the parameter space of coupling constants, scalar field background value and renormalization scale. Some numerical examples are presented both for inflation and quintessence, but the approach is general and can be applied to any scalar field effective potential. The consequences to dark energy of the decoupling effect developed here is that the quintessence field need not just be an incredibly weakly interacting field, often added as simply an add-on to generate dark energy and have no other purpose. Instead, this quintessence field could play a central role in the particle physics dynamics at early times and then simply decouple at late times before the onset of the dark energy phase. For inflation a consequence is coupling of the inflaton to other fields can be much larger in certain models, without needing supersymmetry to control quantum corrections.