Attractors, bifurcations and curvature in multi-field inflation

Perseas Christodoulidis*, Diederik Roest, Evangelos Sfakianakis

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

22 Citations (Scopus)
51 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Recent years have seen the introduction of various multi-field inflationary scenarios in which the curvature and geodesics of the scalar manifold play a crucial role. We outline a simple description that unifies these different proposals and discuss their stability criteria. We demonstrate how the underlying dynamics is governed by an effective potential, whose critical points and bifurcations determine the late-time behaviour of the system, thus unifying hyperinflation, angular, orbital and side-tracked inflation. Interestingly, we show that hyperinflation is a special case of side-tracked inflation, relying on the enhanced isometries of the hyperbolic manifold. We provide the explicit coordinate transformation that maps the two models into each other. Finally, we relax the assumption of a field-space isometry along the inflationary direction that has been considered a prerequisite in the literature so far. We explicitly construct inflationary solutions that do not proceed along a field-space isometry or geodesic and use them to discuss stability criteria.

Original languageEnglish
Article number006
Number of pages21
JournalJournal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Volume2020
Issue number8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 4-Aug-2020

Keywords

  • inflation
  • physics of the early universe

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Attractors, bifurcations and curvature in multi-field inflation'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this