Ultra slow-roll G-inflation

TL;DR

This paper explores ultra slow-roll G-inflation, revealing a unique power spectrum with oscillations, and discusses implications for cosmic microwave background anomalies and tensor tilt constraints.

Contribution

It extends ultra slow-roll inflation models to include non-canonical kinetic terms, analyzing the resulting perturbation evolution and spectral features.

Findings

Primordial power spectrum exhibits a broken power law with oscillations.

Violation of the null energy condition is prohibited in potential-driven ultra slow-roll G-inflation.

Blue tensor tilt is impossible when inflation is potential-driven.

Abstract

The conventional slow-roll approximation is broken in the so-called "ultra slow-roll" models of inflation, for which the inflaton potential is exactly (or extremely) flat. The interesting nature of (canonical) ultra slow-roll inflation is that the curvature perturbation grows on superhorizon scales, but has a scale-invariant power spectrum. We study the ultra slow-roll inflationary dynamics in the presence of non-canonical kinetic terms of the scalar field, namely ultra slow-roll G-inflation. We compute the evolution of the curvature perturbation and show that the primordial power spectrum follows a broken power law with an oscillation feature. It is demonstrated that this could explain the lack of large-scale power in the cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies. We also point out that the violation of the null energy condition is prohibited in ultra slow-roll G-inflation and hence a blue tensor tilt is impossible as long as inflation is driven by the potential. This statement is, however, not true if the energy density is dominated by the kinetic energy of the scalar field.