Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential revisited in the context of Warm Inflation

TL;DR

This paper addresses whether Warm Inflation (WI) can be realized on the very steep left wing of the Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential and whether the same scalar field can drive a transient Dark Energy phase on the right wing, thereby yielding a warm quintessential inflation scenario. The authors employ a strong-dissipation WI framework with a cubic-temperature dissipative coefficient and numerically compute the G(Q) function to fit Planck, ACT, and DESI data, finding a best-fit $\lambda \approx 1.029$ and a left-wing inflation ending near the bottom of the potential with a vanishing tensor-to-scalar ratio. They propose two-wing normalization of the WOR potential and introduce an additional dissipative term for quintessence on the right wing to sustain slow-roll, yielding a transient Dark Energy epoch with $\Omega_{\phi0} \approx 0.689$ and $z_{eq} \approx 3388$. Overall, the work offers a reheating-free, unified warm inflation–quintessence framework, though it relies on a broken C^1 potential and a right-wing dissipative mechanism to realize late-time acceleration.

Abstract

Warm Inflation is a scenario in which the inflaton field dissipates its energy during inflation to maintain a subdominant constant radiation bath. Two of its remarkable features are (i) inflation can be realized even by very steep potentials and (ii) such a scenario doesn't call for a separate post-inflation reheating phase. We exploit the first feature to show that Warm Inflation can successfully take place on the very steep left wing of the Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential while remaining in excellent agreement with current cosmological data (joint analysis of Planck, ACT and DESI). The Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential has a flatter right wing as well, which opens up the possibility of dark energy when the field rolls along this wing. However in order to successfully realize quintessential inflation one needs to (i) normalize the two wings of the Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential differently in order to bridge between the two extreme energy scales of inflation and dark energy, (ii) allow the quintessence field to be dissipative, which is consistent with the presence of a dissipative term in warm inflation. The dissipative dynamics of the quintessence field is needed in order to sustain slow-roll in the right wing. With these modifications, we demonstrate that the Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential can give rise to a unified model of warm inflation (on the left wing) and transient dark energy (on the right wing).

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: Witten-O'Raifeartaigh Inflation potential as given in Eq. (\ref{['WRI-potential']}). The dotted line divides the very steep left wing of the potential from its flatter right wing. The arrow on the right wing depicts the direction along which the slowly rolling inflaton evolves in Cold inflation.
• Figure 2: The comparison of the approximated analytical form of G(Q) proposed in Das:2020xmh with the numerically generated ones using WI2easyRodrigues:2025neh and SWIMUmang
• Figure 3: The Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential plotted schematically, marking the regions of graceful exit from WI.
• Figure 4: The Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential with different values of $\lambda$
• Figure 5: The posterior distribution of parameters of the Warm Inflation model taking place in the left wing of the Witten-O'Raifeartaigh potential