Gauging scale symmetry and inflation: Weyl versus Palatini gravity

Abstract

Abstract We present a comparative study of inflation in two theories of quadratic gravity with gauged scale symmetry: (1) the original Weyl quadratic gravity and (2) the theory defined by a similar action but in the Palatini approach obtained by replacing the Weyl connection by its Palatini counterpart. These theories have different vectorial non-metricity induced by the gauge field ( $$w_\mu $$ w μ ) of this symmetry. Both theories have a novel spontaneous breaking of gauged scale symmetry, in the absence of matter, where the necessary scalar field is not added ad-hoc to this purpose but is of geometric origin and part of the quadratic action. The Einstein-Proca action (of $$w_\mu $$ w μ ), Planck scale and metricity emerge in the broken phase after $$w_\mu $$ w μ acquires mass (Stueckelberg mechanism), then decouples. In the presence of matter ( $$\phi _1$$ ϕ 1 ), non-minimally coupled, the scalar potential is similar in both theories up to couplings and field rescaling. For small field values the potential is Higgs-like while for large fields inflation is possible. Due to their $$R^2$$ R 2 term, both theories have a small tensor-to-scalar ratio ( $$r\sim 10^{-3}$$ r ∼ 10 - 3 ), larger in Palatini case. For a fixed spectral index $$n_s$$ n s , reducing the non-minimal coupling ( $$\xi _1$$ ξ 1 ) increases r which in Weyl theory is bounded from above by that of Starobinsky inflation. For a small enough $$\xi _1\le 10^{-3}$$ ξ 1 ≤ 10 - 3 , unlike the Palatini version, Weyl theory gives a dependence $$r(n_s)$$ r ( n s ) similar to that in Starobinsky inflation, while also protecting r against higher dimensional operators corrections.