Arciniega, GustavoBueno, PabloCano, Pablo A.Edelstein Glaubach, José DanielHennigar, Robie A.Jaime, Luisa G.2020-04-292020-04-292020-01-22Gustavo Arciniega, Pablo Bueno, Pablo A. Cano, José D. Edelstein, Robie A. Hennigar, Luisa G. Jaime, Geometric inflation, Physics Letters B, Volume 802, 2020, 135242, ISSN 0370-2693, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2020.1352420370-2693http://hdl.handle.net/10347/21871We argue that the presence of an inflationary epoch is a natural, almost unavoidable, consequence of the existence of a sensible action involving an infinite tower of higher-curvature corrections to the Einstein-Hilbert action. No additional fields besides the metric are required. We show that a family of such corrections giving rise to a well-posed cosmological evolution exists and automatically replaces the radiation-dominated early-universe Big Bang by a period of exponential growth of the scale factor, which is gracefully connected with standard late-time ΛCDM cosmology. The class of higher-curvature theories giving rise to sensible cosmological evolution share additional remarkable properties such as the existence of Schwarzschild-like non-hairy black holes, or the fact that, just like for Einstein gravity, the only degrees of freedom propagated on the vacuum are those of the standard graviton.eng©2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/journal article10.1016/j.physletb.2020.1352421873-2445open access