Entropy Production and Cosmological Inflation

TL;DR

This paper explains cosmological inflation as a result of high entropy production from internal heating, eliminating the need for hypothetical fields like inflaton or quintessence, based on thermodynamic principles within general relativity.

Contribution

It introduces a thermodynamic explanation for inflation driven by entropy production, avoiding the need for additional scalar fields.

Findings

Inflation can be explained by entropy production from internal heating.

No need for inflaton or quintessence fields in this model.

Thermodynamic principles suffice to understand inflation.

Abstract

The notion of inflation (past or present) in standard cosmological models is shown to be a consequence of a sufficiently high second law entropy production from the internal heating of the universal expansion. The longitudinal viscous internal heating of matter requires neither ``inflaton'' fields nor ``quintessence'' fields which in theory may induce a cosmological term into the Einstein equations. The purely thermodynamic principles required to understand inflation within the context of the standard general relativity equations will be discussed in detail.