Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2017) 132: 433
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2017-11695-1

Regular Article

Reconstruction of k-essence inflation in Horndeski gravity

¹ Department of General & Theoretical Physics and Eurasian Center for Theoretical Physics, Eurasian National University, 010008, Astana, Kazakhstan
² Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Trento, Trento, Italy
³ Department of Theoretical and Nuclear Physics, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Al-Farabi Almaty, Kazakhstan

^* e-mail: lorenzo.sebastiani@unitn.it

Received: 5 March 2017
Accepted: 9 September 2017
Published online: 20 October 2017

Abstract

In this paper, we analyzed inflation from k-essence in the framework of Horndeski gravity. In particular, we considered the models of canonical scalar field and k-essence with quadratic kinetic term. Viable inflationary models can be reconstructed by starting from cosmological data. Several possibilities are explored in order to correctly reproduce the spectral index and the tensor-to-scalar ratio of primordial cosmological perturbations.