SO(10) GUT models and cosmology

SO(10) grand unified models have an intermediate symmetry group in between SO(10) and SU(3)C ⊗ SU(2)L ⊗ U(1)Y. Hence they lead to a prediction for proton lifetime in agreement with the experimental lower limit. This paper reviews the recent work on the tree-level potential and the one-loop effective potential for such models, with application to inflationary cosmology. The open problems are the use of the most general form of tree-level potential for SO(10) models in the reheating stage of the early universe, and the analysis of non-local effects in the semiclassical field equations for such models in Friedmann-Robertson-Walker backgrounds.