Inflation and Reheating through an Independent Affine Connection

Abstract

This paper is based on a talk in which I discussed how a component of the dynamical affine connection, that is independent of the metric, can drive inflation in agreement with observations. This provides a geometrical origin for the inflaton. I also illustrated how the decays of this field, which has spin 0 and odd parity, into Higgs bosons can reheat the universe to a sufficiently high temperature.

Comments: 8 pages, 2 figures; contribution to the proceedings of the XI International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics (ICNFP 2022)