This work develops the inflationary sector of the Time-Varying Cosmological Framework (TVCF), in which the vacuum is treated as a non-equilibrium dynamical system with memory and non-local response. Within this framework, inflation emerges as a metastable non-equilibrium regime characterized by a slow relaxation of the vacuum energy density, without the introduction of a fundamental scalar inflaton field. The condition τH ≫ 1 naturally leads to a quasi-de Sitter expansion phase. Primordial perturbations arise from stochastic fluctuations of the vacuum, with amplitudes determined by the effective number of microscopic degrees of freedom. The resulting spectrum is consistent with standard observational constraints while predicting a suppressed tensor-to-scalar ratio. This work extends the core TVCF framework developed in the companion preprint (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19700350), which introduces the non-equilibrium vacuum dynamics, dark energy sector, and non-local gravitational phenomenology. Together, both works define a unified description of cosmological dynamics across all scales, from inflation to late-time acceleration and galactic structure.
Edo Ram (Wed,) studied this question.