We investigate models in which the inflaton emerges as a composite field of a four dimensional, strongly interacting and nonsupersymmetric gauge theory featuring only fermionic matter. We show that it is possible to obtain successful inflation via non-minimal coupling to gravity, and that the underlying dynamics is preferred to be near conformal. We discover that the compositeness scale of inflation is of the order of the grand unified energy scale.

In this paper, we investigate the effect of the Generalized Uncertainty Principle (GUP) in the Casimir wormhole spacetime recently proposed by Garattini [Eur. Phys. J. C (2019) 79: 951]. In particular, we consider three types of the GUP relations, firstly the Kempf, Mangano and Mann (KMM) model, secondly the Detournay, Gabriel and Spindel (DGS) model, and finally the so called type II model for GUP principle. To this end, we consider three specific models of the redshift function along with two different EoS of state given by P r (r) = ω r (r)ρ(r) along with P t (r) = ω t (r)P r (r) and obtain a class of asymptotically flat wormhole solutions supported by Casimir energy under the effect of GUP. Furthermore we check the null, weak, and strong condition at the wormhole throat with a radius r 0 , and show that in general the classical energy condition are violated by some arbitrary quantity at the wormhole throat. Importantly, we examine the wormhole geometry with semi-classical corrections via embedding diagrams. We also consider the ADM mass of the wormhole, the volume integral quantifier to calculate the amount of the exotic matter near the wormhole throat, and the deflection angle of light.

We explore the paradigm in which inflation is driven by a four-dimensional strongly coupled dynamics with a non-minimal coupling to gravity. We introduce a model where the inflaton is identified with the glueball field of a pure Yang-Mills theory. We introduce the dilatonic-like glueball action, which is obtained by requiring saturation of the underlying Yang-Mills trace anomaly at the effective action level. We couple the resulting action non-minimally to gravity. We demonstrate that it is possible to achieve successful inflation with the confining scale of the underlying Yang-Mills theory naturally of the order of the grand unified energy scale. We also argue that the metric formulation gives a more consistent picture for models of composite inflation than the Palatini one. Finally we show that, within the metric formulation, the model nicely respects tree-level unitarity for the scattering of the inflaton field all the way to the Planck scale.