Relic gravitational waves from quintessential inflation

Abstract

We study relic gravitational waves in the paradigm of quintessential inflation. In this framework, irrespective of the underlying model, inflation is followed by the kinetic regime. Thereafter, the field energy density remains sub-dominant before the onset of acceleration. We carry out model independent analysis to obtain the temperature at the end of inflation and the estimate for upper bound on the Hubble parameter to circumvent the problem due to relic gravitational waves. In this process, we used Planck 2015 data to constrain the inflationary phase. We demonstrate that the required temperature can be produced by the mechanism of instant preheating. The generic feature of the scenario includes the presence of kinetic regime after inflation which results into blue spectrum of gravitational wave background at high frequencies. We discuss the prospects of detection of relic gravitational wave background in the advanced LIGO and LISA space-born gravitational wave missions. Finally we consider a concrete model to realize the paradigm of quintessential inflation and show that inflationary as well as post-inflationary evolution can successfully be described by the inflaton potential, $V(\phi) \propto Exp(-\lambda \phi^n/\Mpl^n)(n>1)$, by suitably constraining the parameters of the model.