Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential revisited in the context of Warm Inflation

TL;DR

This paper revisits the Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential within warm inflation, showing it can support inflation on steep potentials and potentially unify inflation with dark energy through modified dynamics.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential can support warm inflation on steep slopes and be adapted to unify inflation with dark energy via different normalization and dissipative dynamics.

Findings

Warm inflation can occur on the steep left wing of the potential.

The potential can be normalized to connect inflation and dark energy.

Dissipative quintessence allows slow-roll on the right wing.

Abstract

Warm Inflation is a scenario in which the inflaton field dissipates its energy during inflation to maintain a subdominant constant radiation bath. Two of its remarkable features are (i) inflation can be realized even by very steep potentials and (ii) such a scenario doesn't call for a separate post-inflation reheating phase. We exploit the first feature to show that Warm Inflation can successfully take place on the very steep left wing of the Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential while remaining in excellent agreement with current cosmological data (joint analysis of Planck, ACT and DESI). The Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential has a flatter right wing as well, which opens up the possibility of dark energy when the field rolls along this wing. However in order to successfully realize quintessential inflation one needs to (i) normalize the two wings of the Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential differently in order to bridge between the two extreme energy scales of inflation and dark energy, (ii) allow the quintessence field to be dissipative, which is consistent with the presence of a dissipative term in warm inflation. The dissipative dynamics of the quintessence field is needed in order to sustain slow-roll in the right wing. With these modifications, we demonstrate that the Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential can give rise to a unified model of warm inflation (on the left wing) and transient dark energy (on the right wing).