Inflation in simple one-loop effective potentials of perturbative quantum gravity

Abstract

We study inflation in scalar-tensor perturbative quantum gravity driven by a one-loop effective potential. We consider effective potentials generated by three models. The first model describes a single scalar field with a non-vanishing mass. The second model describes a massless scalar field with non-minimal coupling to the Einstein tensor. The third model generalises the Coleman-Weinberg model for the gravitational case. The first model can be consistent with the observational data for $N\sim 70$ e-foldings. The second model can be consistent with the observational data for $N \sim 40$ e-foldings. We did not find parameters that make the generalised Coleman-Weinberg model consistent with the observational data. We discuss the implications of these results and ways to improve them with other terms of effective action.