Confronting phantom inflation with Planck data

TL;DR

This paper explores phantom inflation models with <1 using Planck data, finding current data cannot distinguish it from standard inflation but future measurements might.

Contribution

It introduces a slow-climb phantom inflation model with two hybrid fields and analyzes its compatibility with Planck data, highlighting differences from normal inflation.

Findings

Current Planck data cannot discriminate between normal and phantom inflation.

In phantom inflation,  remains close to  during inflation.

Both upper and lower bounds on tensor-to-scalar ratio are obtained in phantom scenario.

Abstract

The latest Planck results are in excellent agreement with the theoretical expectations predicted from standard normal inflation based on slow-roll approximation which assumes equation-of-state $\omega \geq-1$. In this work, we study the phantom inflation ($\omega<-1$) as an alternative cosmological model within the slow-climb approximation using two hybrid inflationary fields. We perform Chain Monte Carlo analysis to determine the posterior distribution and best fit values for the cosmological parameters using Planck data and show that current CMB data does not discriminate between normal and phantom inflation. Interestingly, unlike in normal inflation, $\omega$ in phantom induced inflation evolves very slowly away from $-1$ during the inflation. Furthermore, in contrast to the standard normal inflation for which only upper bound on tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ are possible, we obtain both upper and lower bounds for the two hybrid fields in the phantom scenario. Finally, we discuss prospects of future high precision polarization measurements and show that it may be possible to establish the dominance of one model over the other.