Quintessential Inflation in Light of ACT DR6

TL;DR

This paper investigates a minimal quintessential inflation model with a runaway exponential potential, predicting precise inflationary observables and a detectable gravitational-wave background, linking early and late cosmic acceleration.

Contribution

It provides a highly predictive, single-field quintessential inflation model that tightly links inflationary parameters with late-time acceleration and forecasts a detectable gravitational-wave background.

Findings

Predicted spectral index n_s = 0.964241

Tensor-to-scalar ratio r = 7.48e-5 at N=60

Detectable blue-tilted gravitational-wave background for future interferometers

Abstract

We perform a precision investigation of smooth quintessential inflation in which a single canonical scalar field unifies the two known phases of cosmic acceleration. Using a CMB-normalized runaway exponential potential, we obtain sharply predictive inflationary observables: a red-tilted spectrum with $n_s = 0.964241$ and an exceptionally suppressed tensor-to-scalar ratio $r = 7.48 \times 10^{-5}$ at $N=60$, lying near the optimal region of current Planck+ACT constraints. Remarkably, all observable scales exit the horizon within an extremely narrow field interval $\Delta\phi \simeq 0.03\,M_{\rm Pl}$, tightly linking early and late-time dynamics and reducing theoretical ambiguities. While inflationary tensors remain invisible to CMB B-mode surveys, the subsequent stiff epoch-an intrinsic hallmark of quintessential cosmology-imprints a blue-tilted stochastic gravitational-wave background within the discovery reach of future interferometers such as LISA, DECIGO, ALIA, and BBO. Our results demonstrate that this minimal, featureless model not only survives current bounds, but provides concrete, falsifiable predictions across gravitational-wave frequencies spanning over twenty orders of magnitude.