Kination cosmology from scalar fields and gravitational-wave signatures

Understand

Kination denotes an era in the cosmological history corresponding to an equation of state $\omega=+1$ such that the total energy density of the universe redshifts as the sixth inverse power of the scale factor.

• This arises if the universe is dominated by the kinetic energy of a scalar field.
• It has often been motivated in the literature as an era following inflation, taking place before the radiation era.
• In this paper, we review instead the possibility that kination is disconnected from primordial inflation and occurs much later, inside the Standard Model radiation era.