Dinâmica cosmológica: da inflação ao reaquecimento - uma modelagem da evolução do universo primordial

Abstract

The most current observational data corroborate the Starobinsky model as one of the strongest candidates in the description of an inflationary regime. Motivated by this success, extensions of the Starobinsky model have become increasingly recurrent in the literature. The theoretical justification for this is well grounded: higher-order gravities arise in high-energy physics in the search for the ultraviolet completeness of general relativity. In this work, we propose to investigate inflation due to the extension of the Starobinsky model characterized by the inclusion of the R^3 term. We highlight here that the present work is an adaptation of the paper entitled 'Higher-order extension of Starobinsky inflation: Initial conditions, slow-roll regime, and reheating phase,' published in Physical Review D.

We begin the work with a brief overview of the events that led to the construction of Inflationary Cosmology. Next, we present a summary of the inflationary mechanism and the reheating of the primordial universe. Finally, we perform a complete analysis of the potential and phase space of the R^3 model, where we observe the existence of three regions with distinct dynamics for the scalar field. Subsequently, we implement a restrictive limit for the number of e-folds through the reheating process. With this, it was possible to properly confront our model with the observational data from Planck, BICEP3/Keck, and BAO.