Inflation and Linear Expansion in the Radiation Dominated era in Jordan-Brans-Dicke Cosmology

Abstract: We present several features of a cosmological model based on the Brans-Dicke-Jordan-Thirry action which is scale invariant with a quartic potential for the Jordan scalar field. We show that the radiation dominated era starts with a closed universe which expands exponentially and the late radiation dominated era expands linearly. We find that there may be a scale-invariant phase with stiff matter between these two radiation dominated eras. The introduction of matter in the linearly expanding universe causes deceleration.