Research Projects

The teleparallel theories of gravity have gained interest and extensive studies in the recent years as they provide new perspectives into the study of gravity and its extensions. The f(Q) gravity theories which replace General Relativity’s curvature with non-metricity as the source of gravity in the flat and torsionless spacetime also offer new insights into our understanding of gravity in in the cosmological context and black hole physics. While research on f(Q) theories have been actively going on, the non-minimal coupling of scalar field to f(Q) gravity has seen only a handful of pursuit. The aim of this project is to investigate cosmological inflation wherein the scalar field is coupled non-minimally to the non-metricity scalar. This will yield a new formulation of the non-minimal interaction between scalar fields in the early universe. While the non-minimal coupling between the scalar field and gravity in GR framework leads to re-validation of many inflation models that are ruled out by current observations, it is interesting to investigate what would happen in the f(Q) framework. Therefore, this project aims to study the change in the formulation of the inflationary dynamics and the subsequent predictions for the inflationary and reheating observables due to this interaction. The viability of the newly reconstructed inflation models due this change in the formulations and predictions will be validated with observational data.

f(Q) gravity, non-minimal coupling, inflation, inflation models, flat spacetime, reheating