Steep inflation followed by Born-Infeld reheating

We discuss a model in which high energy brane corrections allow a single scalar field to describe inflation at early epochs and quintessence at late times. The reheating mechanism in the model originates from Born-Itifeld matter whose energy density mimics cosmological constant at very early times and manifests itself as radiation subsequently. During the inflationary evolution the Born-Infeld matter remains sub-dominant to the scalar field. Shortly before the end of inflation driven by the scalar field, the energy density of Born-Infeld matter starts scaling as radiation and drops by several orders of magnitudes at the epoch inflation ends. The problem of over production of gravity wave background in scenarios based upon reheating through gravitational particle production is successfully resolved by suitably fixing the initial value of radiation energy density at the end of inflation. No additional fine tuning of the parameters is required for a viable evolution. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.