Initial conditions for noncanonical inflation
- Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 University Street, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2T8 (Canada)
- Department of Physics, King's College London, Strand, London, United Kingdom, WC2R 2LS (United Kingdom)
We investigate the dynamics of homogeneous phase space for single-field models of inflation. Inflationary trajectories are formally attractors in phase space, but since in practice not all initial conditions lead to them, some degree of fine-tuning is required for successful inflation. We explore how the dynamics of noncanonical inflation, which is driven by the potential energy but has additional kinetic terms that are powers of the kinetic energy, can play a role in ameliorating the initial-conditions fine-tuning problem. We present an analysis of inflationary phase space based on the dynamical behavior of the scalar field. This allows us to construct the flow of trajectories, finding that they generically decay towards the inflationary solution at a steeper angle for noncanonical kinetic terms, in comparison to canonical kinetic terms, so that a larger fraction of the initial-conditions space leads to inflation. Thus, noncanonical kinetic terms can be important for removing the initial conditions fine-tuning problem of some small-field inflation models.
- OSTI ID:
- 21421135
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Journal Name: Physical Review. D, Particles Fields Journal Issue: 6 Vol. 82; ISSN PRVDAQ; ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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