Further refining Swampland Conjecture on inflation in general scalar-tensor theories of gravity

TL;DR

This paper tests three inflation models within general scalar-tensor theories against a refined de Sitter swampland conjecture, finding that all models satisfy the conjecture and may belong to the landscape.

Contribution

It applies a recently proposed refined swampland conjecture to various inflation models in scalar-tensor theories, demonstrating their compatibility.

Findings

All three inflation models satisfy the refined swampland conjecture.

Models can be in the landscape with proper parameter choices.

Supports the viability of these models within string theory constraints.

Abstract

An alternative refined de Sitter conjecture giving rise to a natural combination of the first and second derivatives of the scalar potential was proposed recently by David Andriot and Christoph Roupec (Fortsch. Phys. 67 (2019) no.1-2, 1800105). In this work, we study the inflation models in a general scalar-tensor theory with exponential and hyperbolic tangent forms of potential as well as model with quantum corrected potential and examine whether these three models of inflation can satisfy this further refining de Sitter swampland conjecture or not. Regarding our analysis with proper choices of parameters with proper choices of parameters $a,b=1-a$ and $q$, we find that these three inflationary models can always satisfy this new refined swampland conjecture. Therefore, all three inflationary models might all be in landscape since the further refining de Sitter swampland conjecture is satisfied.