Inflation driven by Barrow holographic dark energy

In this work, we have investigated the inflation mechanism driven by the Barrow Holographic dark energy (BHDE) in the early universe. BHDE is based on the Barrow relation for horizon entropy, which in turn is inspired by the shape of the COVID-19 virus. It was shown by Barrow that the quantum gravitational effects may instigate complex fractal features in the structure of a black hole. Since the length scale during the inflation is expected to be small, the energy density obtained from the application of the holographic principle in the early universe will be large enough to support the inflationary scenario. Using the Granda-Oliveros IR cut-off, we have studied the inflationary scenario with the universe filled with BHDE. Various analytic solutions for the model were found out including the slow-roll parameters, scalar spectral index, and tensor-to-scalar ratio. Since inflation is generally attributed to the presence of scalar fields, we have explored a correspondence between BHDE and scalar field models. Both canonical scalar field and the Tachyonic scalar field have been considered for this purpose. The evolution of the potential generated from the fields is plotted and found to be consistent with the observations. From this work, we see that BHDE can be a model of dark energy that can successfully drive early time inflation.