On the possibility of braneworld quintessential inflation

Understand

We examine the possibility of achieving quintessential inflation, where the same field serves as both inflaton and quintessence, in the context of a five-dimensional braneworld.

• Braneworld cosmology provides an appropriate environment as it permits inflation with much steeper potentials than the conventional scenario, which is favourable to a late-time quintessence.
• We explore a wide space of models, together with contemporary observational data, to determine in which contexts such a picture is possible.
• We find that such a scenario, although attractive, is in fact impossible to achieve for the potentials studied due to the restrictiveness of current data.