Emergence of inflaton potential from asymptotically safe gravity

Abstract: The Asymptotic Safety Hypothesis for gravity relies on the existence of an interacting fixed point of the Wilsonian renormalization group flow, which controls the microscopic dynamics, and provides a UV completion of the theory. Connecting such UV completion to observable physics has become an active area of research in the last decades. In this work we show such connection within the framework of scalar-tensor models. More specifically, we found that cosmological inflation naturally emerges from the integration of the RG flow equations, and that the predicted parameters of the emergent effective potentials provide a slow-roll model of inflation compatible with current observations. Furthermore, the RG evolution of the effective action starting at the UV fixed point, provides a prediction for the initial value of the inflaton field.