Inflatonless inflation

Abstract

Whichever could be the real theory of gravitation, the corresponding low-energy effective lagrangian will probably contain higher derivative terms. In this work we study the general conditions on those terms in order to produce enough inflation to solve some of the problems of the standard Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmology in absence of any inflaton field. We apply our results to some particular scenarios where higher derivative terms appear in the effective lagrangian for gravity like those coming from graviton (two)-loops or integrating out ordinary matter (like the one present in the Standard Model).