Fine tuning may not be enough

Journal Article · Tue Sep 01 00:00:00 EDT 2015 · Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2015/09/022· OSTI ID:22525376

Miao, S. P. ^[1]

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1. Department of Physics, National Cheng Kung University, No.1, University Road, Tainan City 70101, Taiwan (China)

We argue that the fine tuning problems of scalar-driven inflation may be worse than is commonly believed. The reason is that reheating requires the inflaton to be coupled to other matter fields whose vacuum fluctuations alter the inflaton potential. The usual response has been that even more fine-tuning of the classical potential V(φ) can repair any damage done in this way. We point out that the effective potential in de Sitter background actually depends in a complicated way upon the dimensionless combination of φ/H. We also show that the factors of H which occur in de Sitter do not even correspond to local functionals of the metric for general geometries, nor are they Planck-suppressed.

• OSTI ID: 22525376
• Journal Information: Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2015, Issue 09; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
COSMOLOGICAL INFLATION
DE SITTER GROUP
DE SITTER SPACE
FLUCTUATIONS
INFLATIONARY UNIVERSE
INFLATONS
METRICS
POTENTIALS
SCALARS