Warm inflation is a scenario in which the inflaton field dissipates its energy during inflation to maintain a subdominant constant radiation bath. Two of its remarkable features are (i) inflation can be realized even by very steep potentials and (ii) such a scenario does not call for a separate postinflation reheating phase. We exploit the first feature to show that warm inflation can successfully take place on the very steep left wing of the Witten-O’Raifeartaigh potential while remaining in excellent agreement with current cosmological data (joint analysis of Planck, ACT, and DESI). The Witten-O’Raifeartaigh potential has a flatter right wing as well, which opens up the possibility of dark energy when the field rolls along this wing. However, in order to successfully realize quintessential inflation one needs to (i) normalize the two wings of the Witten-O’Raifeartaigh potential differently in order to bridge between the two extreme energy scales of inflation and dark energy, and (ii) allow the quintessence field to be dissipative, which is consistent with the presence of a dissipative term in warm inflation. The dissipative dynamics of the quintessence field is needed in order to sustain slow roll in the right wing. With these modifications, we demonstrate that the Witten-O’Raifeartaigh potential can give rise to a unified model of warm inflation (on the left wing) and transient dark energy (on the right wing).

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• Dark energy
• Inflation
• Quantum cosmology