On the Construction of Quintessential Inflation Models

TL;DR

This paper explores models that unify inflation and dark energy using a single scalar field, focusing on initial conditions and how inflation can set them for current cosmological observations.

Contribution

It analyzes initial conditions in quintessential inflation models and demonstrates how inflation can determine them within a viable range.

Findings

Inflation can set initial conditions suitable for current dark energy models.

Explicit examples show initial conditions are naturally fixed by inflation.

The models support a unified scalar field for early and late universe dynamics.

Abstract

Attention has been recently drawn towards models in which inflation and quintessence schemes are unified. In such `quintessential inflation' models, a unique scalar field is required to play both the role of the inflaton and of the late-time dynamical cosmological constant. We address the issue of the initial conditions for quintessence in this context and find that, in the two explicit examples provided, inflation can uniquely fix them to be in the allowed range for a present day tracking.