Inflating and Reheating the Universe with an Independent Affine Connection

It is shown that a component of the dynamical affine connection, which is independent of the metric, can drive inflation in agreement with observations. This provides a geometrical origin for the inflaton. It is also found that the decays of this field, which has spin 0 and odd parity, into Higgs bosons can reheat the universe up to a sufficiently high temperature.