NANOGrav signal from double-inflection-point inflation and dark matter

Abstract

AbstractThe NANOGrav collaboration has published a suspected stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background signal in its analysis of 12.5 years PTA data, so in this work, we investigate the possibility to explain the signal by the inflationary models with double-inflection-point. We calculate the energy spectrum of GWs induced by scalar perturbations, and show that the curve lies in the $$2\sigma $$ 2 σ region of the NANOGrav constraints. In addition, we analyze the reheating process and dark matter production by assuming that the inflaton is coupled with the standard model (SM) Higgs boson and singlet fermionic dark matter field. We discuss the radiative stability of the inflationary potential under one-loop corrections, calculate the reheating temperature, the dark matter production, and constraints on the coupling parameters using the bounds of BBN, Lyman-$$\alpha $$ α , etc.