Generalized Pole Inflation: Hilltop, Natural, and Chaotic Inflationary Attractors

TL;DR

This paper explores a unified framework for inflationary models where observables depend on kinetic term poles, revealing attractor behaviors and corrections for various inflation types.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of inflation models with arbitrary pole orders and additional poles, unifying different inflationary scenarios within a single framework.

Findings

Demonstrates attractor behavior across various inflation models.

Calculates corrections to inflationary observables from additional poles.

Shows how different pole structures lead to hilltop, natural, or chaotic inflation forms.

Abstract

A reformulation of inflationary model analyses appeared recently, in which inflationary observables are determined by the structure of a pole in the inflaton kinetic term rather than the shape of the inflaton potential. We comprehensively study this framework with an arbitrary order of the pole taking into account possible additional poles in the kinetic term or in the potential. Depending on the setup, the canonical potential becomes the form of hilltop or plateau models, variants of natural inflation, power-law inflation, or monomial/polynomial chaotic inflation. We demonstrate attractor behaviors of these models and compute corrections from the additional poles to the inflationary observables.