Inflationary universe without GUTs

The existence of a primordial inflationary era is unavoidable due to the puzzling nature of semiclassical gravitation, regulated by Einstein's equations and the laws of quantum mechanics. This interaction appears to be controlled by a mass-dependent effective gravitational coupling constant. The latter undergoes an unexpected transition from a classical gravitational attractive to an antigravitational repulsive regime when the corresponding mass of a quantum matter field passes through a definite threshold. This induces in turn a gravitational, spontaneously broken symmetry phenomenon responsible for the presence of an unusual non-Minkowskian ground state: the inflationary de Sitter space-time. This then acquires the status of the primordial cosmological vacuum, the generic configuration of our cosmological history.