A Review of Quintessential Inflation

Abstract

Some of the most important quintessential inflation scenarios, such as the Peebles–Vilenkin model, are described in detail. These models are able to explain the early- and late-time accelerated expansions of our universe, and the phase transition from the end of inflation to the beginning of kination where the adiabatic evolution of the universe was broken in order to produce enough particles to reheat the universe with a viable temperature, thereby aligning with the Hot Big Bang universe. In addition, while considering the reheating to be due to the gravitational production of superheavy particles conformally coupled to gravity, we checked that the considered scenarios do not suffer problems due to the overproduction of gravitational waves at the end of inflation, and thus the validity of Big Bang nucleosynthesis is preserved.

Keywords

• inflation
• quintessence
• particle production
• reheating
• gravitational waves