Far-from-Equilibrium Inflation

Abstract: In this informal internal seminar I will report on our ongoing work on isometry-invariant states of non-conformal, strongly coupled matter in de Sitter space using a class of bottom-up holographic models. We find that these models admit multiple de Sitter–symmetric states at a fixed Hubble expansion rate. We observe that, for certain choices of model parameters, such multiple states exist even at arbitrarily small curvatures, with a finite energy density gap between them. This minimum curvature depends exponentially on the model parameters. While gravity is treated as nondynamical in our analysis, the presence of multiple low-curvature states leads to  self-consistent de Sitter solutions of the Friedmann equation governing the cosmology of a universe filled with this matter.
Finally, we argue that these solutions act as natural attractors for the late-time evolution of deeply overcooled matter, which supports thermal inflation while near equilibrium and evolves toward the attractor solutions as it becomes far from equilibrium.