Attractive Lagrangians for noncanonical inflation
- Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 University Street, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2T8 (Canada)
- Department of Physics, King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS (United Kingdom)
Treating inflation as an effective theory, we expect the effective Lagrangian to contain higher-dimensional kinetic operators suppressed by the scale of UV physics. When these operators are powers of the inflaton kinetic energy, the scalar field can support a period of noncanonical inflation which is smoothly connected to the usual slow-roll inflation. We show how to construct noncanonical inflationary solutions to the equations of motion for the first time, and demonstrate that noncanonical inflation is an attractor in phase space for all small- and large-field models. We identify some sufficient conditions on the functional form of the Lagrangian that lead to successful noncanonical inflation since not every Lagrangian with higher-dimensional kinetic operators can support noncanonical inflation. This extends the class of known viable Lagrangians and excludes many Lagrangians which do not work.
- OSTI ID:
- 21408059
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Journal Name: Physical Review. D, Particles Fields Journal Issue: 12 Vol. 81; ISSN PRVDAQ; ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
GENERAL PHYSICS
79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGICAL MODELS
DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS
ENERGY
EQUATIONS
EQUATIONS OF MOTION
FUNCTIONS
INFLATIONARY UNIVERSE
KINETIC ENERGY
LAGRANGIAN FUNCTION
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
MATHEMATICAL SOLUTIONS
MATHEMATICAL SPACE
PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS
PHASE SPACE
SCALAR FIELDS
SPACE