Mimetic DBI Inflation in Confrontation with Planck2018 data

TL;DR

This paper investigates mimetic gravity with a DBI-like scalar field, analyzing its compatibility with Planck2018 data, and finds that certain parameter ranges and constant sound speeds yield models consistent with observational constraints.

Contribution

It introduces and tests the viability of Mimetic DBI inflation models against Planck2018 data, highlighting conditions for stability and observational consistency.

Findings

Mimetic DBI models can be free of ghost and gradient instabilities.

Models with constant sound speed are consistent with Planck2018 data for specific parameters.

Varying sound speed models are generally ruled out by combined observational data.

Abstract

We study mimetic gravity in the presence of a DBI-like term which is a non-canonical setup of the scalar field's derivatives. We consider two general cases with varying and constant sound speeds and construct the potentials for both the DBI and Mimetic DBI models. By considering the power-law scale factor as $a=a_{0}\,t^{n}$, we seek for the observational viability of these models. We show that, the Mimetic DBI model in some ranges of the parameters space is free of ghost and gradient instabilities. By studying $r-n_{s}$ and $\alpha_{s}-n_{s}$ behavior in confrontation with Planck2018 data, we find some constraints on the model's parameters. We show that for the case with varying sound speed, although power-law DBI inflation is not consistent with Planck2018 TT, TE, EE+low E+lensing data, but the Mimetic DBI inflation is consistent with Planck2018 TT, TE, EE+low E+lensing data at 95$\%$ CL, in some ranges of the model's parameters space as $40\leq n \leq 55$ where the model is instabilities-free in these ranges of parameters too. For the constant sound speed, by adopting some sample values of $c_{s}$, we study both DBI and Mimetic DBI model numerically and find $n\sim 10^{2}$ for DBI model and $n\sim 10$ for Mimetic DBI model. We also compare the results with Planck2018 TT, TE, EE+low E+lensing+BK14+BAO data and see that the DBI and Mimetic DBI model with varying sound speed are ruled out with these joint data. However, these models with constant sound speed are consistent with Planck2018 TT, TE, EE+low E+lensing+BK14+BAO data with $n\sim 10^{2}$ for DBI model and $n\sim 10$ for Mimetic DBI model. In this case, we find some tighter constraints on the corresponding sound speed.