SO(10) GUT Models and Cosmology

TL;DR

This paper reviews $SO(10)$ grand unified theories, focusing on their potentials and implications for inflationary cosmology, highlighting recent theoretical developments and open problems in early universe modeling.

Contribution

It summarizes recent work on the tree-level and one-loop effective potentials in $SO(10)$ models and discusses open challenges in early universe reheating and non-local effects.

Findings

Proton lifetime predictions align with experimental limits.

Recent analysis of the effective potential informs inflationary scenarios.

Open problems include modeling reheating and non-local effects in $SO(10)$ cosmology.

Abstract

$SO(10)$ grand unified models have an intermediate symmetry group in between $SO(10)$ and $SU(3)_{C} \otimes SU(2)_{L} \otimes U(1)_{Y}$. Hence they lead to a prediction for proton lifetime in agreement with the experimental lower limit. This paper reviews the recent work on the tree-level potential and the one-loop effective potential for such models, with application to inflationary cosmology. The open problems are the use of the most general form of tree-level potential for $SO(10)$ models in the reheating stage of the early universe, and the analysis of non-local effects in the semiclassical field equations for such models in Friedmann-Robertson-Walker backgrounds.