Preventing eternality in phantom inflation

TL;DR

This paper explores conditions to prevent eternal phantom inflation by analyzing slow-climb criteria, fluctuations, and explicit solutions, demonstrating that phantom inflation can be finite without exotic mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of conditions preventing eternal phantom inflation, including nonminimal coupling effects and stochastic fluctuation considerations.

Findings

Phantom inflation can be finite without exotic mechanisms.

Slow-climb conditions are derived for nonminimal coupling scenarios.

Explicit solutions confirm the finiteness of phantom inflation.

Abstract

We have investigated the necessary conditions that prevent phantom inflation from being eternal. Allowing additionally for a nonminimal coupling between the phantom field and gravity, we present the slow-climb requirements, perform an analysis of the fluctuations, and finally we extract the overall conditions that are necessary in order to prevent eternality. Furthermore, we verify our results by solving explicitly the cosmological equations in a simple example of an exponential potential, formulating the classical motion plus the stochastic effect of the fluctuations through Langevin equations. Our analysis shows that phantom inflation can be finite without the need of additional exotic mechanisms.