Inflationary cosmology connecting dark energy and dark matter

Abstract

Kination dominated quintessence models of dark energy have the intriguing feature that the relic abundance of thermal cold dark matter can be significantly enhanced compared to the predictions from standard cosmology. Previous treatments of such models do not include a realistic embedding of inflationary initial conditions. We remedy this situation by constructing a viable inflationary model in which the inflaton and quintessence field are the same scalar degree of freedom. Kination domination is achieved after inflation through a strong push or ``kick'' of the inflaton, and sufficient reheating can be achieved depending on model parameters. This allows us to explore both model-dependent and model-independent cosmological predictions of this scenario. We find that measurements of the B-mode cosmic microwave background polarization can rule out this class of scenarios almost model independently. We also discuss other experimentally accessible signatures for this class of models.