Hilltop inflation

By Lotfi Boubekeur, D. Lyth. 2005

384 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study ‘hilltop’ inflation, in which inflation takes place near a maximum of the potential. Viewed as a model of inflation after the observable Universe leaves the horizon (observable inflation), hilltop inflation is rather generic. If the potential steepens monotonically, observable hilltop inflation gives a tiny tensor fraction . The usual F- and D-term models may easily be transmuted to hilltop models by Planck-suppressed terms, making them more natural. The only commonly considered model of observable inflation which is definitely not hilltop is tree-level hybrid inflation. Viewed instead as an initial condition, we explain that hilltop inflation is more generic than seems to have been previously recognized, adding thereby to the credibility of the idea that eternal inflation provides the pre-inflationary initial condition.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bc476af670d99901dcd186413066ae208fe5607f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Baumann
2. E. Pajer
3. Andrei Linde
4. R. Kallosh
5. Xingang Chen
6. Liam McAllister
7. L. Senatore
8. M. Zaldarriaga

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Andrei Linde
2. D. Baumann
3. R. Kallosh
4. Liam McAllister
5. E. Pajer
6. Xingang Chen
7. E. Silverstein
8. S. Kachru

Citations in the corpus

• Higgs inflation with loop corrections in the Palatini formulation (2017, neutral): “Let us now consider hilltop inflation [117, 118].”
• Towards inflation in string theory (2003, background): “A new twist in terminology was suggested very recently, when this version of chaotic inflation was called ‘hilltop inflation’ [15].”
• Single field double inflation and primordial black holes (2017, background): “The first inflationary stage is then followed by a second phase of hilltop inflation [59], which lasts for about 20-30 e-folds and creates the large density perturbations that source the PBH production.”
• Universality classes of inflation (2013, background): “An important set of smallfield models is formed by hilltop inflation [12, 13], which has a scalar potential of the form”
• Inflation and string cosmology (2001, background): “A similar problem exists for many of the models advocated in [22, 107].”
• Inflation and String Theory (2014, background): “For small η0, hilltop inflation [215] occurs (see fig.”
• Exploring cosmic origins with CORE: Inflation (2016, background): “We show the predictions for natural inflation [207, 208] (purple band), the hilltop quartic model [209] (orange discrete band), and power law chaotic [35] (light green discrete band) models, accounting for representative uncertainties in the post-inflationary era with 47 < N∗ < 57.”
• Inflation with a constant rate of roll (2014, background): “We shall show that the general exact solution for these models includes power-law inflation [21, 22] and other two solutions: one of them is equivalent to a solution previously found in [23] in a different context, and the other one amounts to a particular case of hilltop inflation [24] with cutoff ”
• Escher in the Sky (2015, background): “of that type later have been called “hilltop inflation” [13].”
• Primordial gravitational waves for universality classes of pseudoscalar inflation (2016, methodology): “Finally we notice that Hilltop models [24] with a potential given by:”
• The best inflationary models after Planck (2013, background): “The logarithmic term encodes loop corrections to the monomial part of the potential [72] and, therefore, natural values of α are such 0 < α 1 whereas β = O(1).”
• Cosmological attractors and initial conditions for inflation (2015, methodology): “This condition is not satisfied in hilltop models [31], in the Starobinsky model [7], in the Higgs inflation model [10], and in the simplest versions of the broad class of the cosmological attractor models discussed in this paper and in [2, 14], where inflation occurs only at V 1.”
• Planck2018 results (2018, background): “Within the class of hilltop inflationary models (Boubekeur & Lyth 2005) we find that a quartic potential provides a better fit than a quadratic one.”