Deflation of the cosmological constant associated with inflation and dark energy

TL;DR

This paper proposes a model where vacuum energy decays during inflation, reducing the cosmological constant from the Planck scale to a small value, potentially explaining dark energy.

Contribution

It introduces a non-minimal coupling between vacuum energy and the inflaton, providing a new mechanism for the cosmological constant's evolution.

Findings

Vacuum energy decays during inflation, deflating the cosmological constant.

Model applicable to various slow-roll inflation scenarios.

Illustrated with two specific inflation potentials.

Abstract

In order to solve the fine-tuning problem of the cosmological constant, we propose a simple model with the vacuum energy non-minimally coupled to the inflaton field. In this model, the vacuum energy decays to the inflaton during pre-inflation and inflation eras, so that the cosmological constant effectively deflates from the Planck mass scale to a much smaller one after inflation and plays the role of dark energy in the late-time of the universe. We show that our deflationary scenario is applicable to arbitrary slow-roll inflation models. We also take two specific inflation potentials to illustrate our results.