Anomaly-induced effective action for gravity and inflation (Q1580913)

The standard cosmological model though it describes the present stage of the universe well, it yet fails to explain the early period of evolution which passed through the period of very rapid inflation by more than 60 orders. The source of inflation is still unclear. The paper under review is an attempt by the authors to fill up this gap. The authors consider a model of the very early universe filled with pure radiation consisting of free, massless, conformally invariant matter fields with negligible interactions between them and derive the source of inflation from quantum vacuum effects of pure radiation in an arbitary curved background. The authors first review the derivation of quantum correction to the classical action of gravity [\textit{R. J. Riegert}, Phys. Lett. B 134, 56-60 (1980); \textit{E. S. Fradkin} and \textit{A. A. Tseytlin}, Phys. Lett. B 134, 187-193 (1980)] which results from the trace anomaly and contains an arbitrary conformally invariant functional [\textit{M. J. Duff}, Nucl. Phys. B 125, 334ff. (1977)]. This functional vanishes in the special case of a conformally flat metric. The authors present a particular inflationary solution strongly depending on the underlying gauge model of particle physics and establish its instability. They consider two special cases: minimum standard model and matter sector of \(N=8\), \(D=4\) supergravity and then critically examine the results of numerical investigations and give a physical analysis of the inflation. Finally, they discuss their conclusions and propose an outline of the further studies. From their findings, ultimately it turns out that inflation is almost an inevitable consequence of the great difference between the Planck mass and that of the heaviest particle.