Cosmological Inflation from a new gravitational model

Cosmological inflation currently has a large number of viable models describing the inflaton field that fit the experimental data. However, these models include kinetic and potential energy terms for the inflaton field that are largely chosen by trial to match the data, and do not have a fundamental underlying principle guiding these choices. We show how a recently developed model of gravity which incorporates an extension of general relativity to include projective invariance (TW gravity) naturally gives rise to a field acting as the inflaton with a specific form of the potential. We find a parameter space for the free parameters of this model that fit the experimental constraints of the most recent cosmological data.