Chaotic Inflation and Reheating in Generalized Scalar-Tensor Gravity

Understand

In the present work, we study slow-roll inflation in scalar-tensor gravity theories in the presence of both the non-minimal coupling between the scalar field and curvature, and the Galileon self-interaction of the scalar field.

• Furthermore, we give predictions for the duration of reheating as well as for the reheating temperature after inflation.
• After working out the expressions for the power spectra of scalar and tensor perturbations in the case of a general non-minimal coupling function that depends solely on the scalar field and a general scalar potential, we focus on the special cases of the power-law coupling function and chaotic quadratic inflation.
• Thus, under the slow-roll approximation we confront the predictions of the model with the current PLANCK constraints on the spectral index $n_s$ and the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ using the $n_{s}-r$ plane.