Curvature-Activated Majorana Condensate in Palatini Gravity: A Minimal EFT Framework for Inflation without an Inflaton

This deposit provides a consolidated and revised version of the manuscript Palatini Majorana Inflation, replacing the first public release while preserving its core philosophy: an inflationary phase without a fundamental inflaton, supported by the metastable vacuum energy of a Majorana condensate within Palatini f(ℛ) gravity. The revision aims to make the framework clearer, internally consistent, and analytically verifiable. In particular: The distinction between the Palatini curvature ℛ (auxiliary, eliminated algebraically) and the metric curvature R(g) (physical) is made explicit and systematic, together with reconstruction identities and physical-branch conditions. The end of inflation is formulated in an EFT-standard way, replacing abrupt prescriptions with smooth decoupling thresholds for heavy modes (e.g., KK towers), and introducing a minimal analytic condition for crossing criticality, consistent with decoupling arguments. A set of lemmas/consistency conditions is added to constrain: (i) exit viability in near-critical regimes, (ii) the self-consistent implementation of the species bound as a cutoff constraint, (iii) minimal requirements for generating perturbations via a modulated end of inflation, and (iv) qualitative compatibility with cosmological constraints on extra relativistic degrees of freedom and with reheating compatible with BBN. Earlier releases remain useful as a historical record; this version is intended as the main reference for the model definition, assumptions, and analytic consistency conditions. License: CC BY 4.0 (see record metadata). Keywords: Palatini gravity; KK; Majorana fermions; NJL; fermion condensate; curvature activation; heat-kernel; early Universe inflation; effective field theory