Eternal Hilltop Inflation

Abstract: Eternal inflation has long been known to be generic in large-field inflation models, where one or more scales in the problem exceed the Planck scale. I consider the case of small-field inflation, in the limit of hilltop-type potentials, where the region in field space admitting eternal inflation is exponentially small. In particular, I consider a simplified model of the hilltop in which the evolution of the inflaton is at all times dominated by quantum evolution instead of classical slow roll, and show that eternal inflation occurs even when all scales in the potential are arbitrarily far below the Planck scale. This provides a simple and clear demonstration that quantum effects at energy scales very small relative to the Planck scale can have an order-unity or larger effect on the global structure of spacetime. I comment on such models in light of recently proposed "Swampland" conjectures.

Video of Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL3m4M4IZi4

Relevant Papers:
[1601.08140] Eternal Hilltop Inflation, by Gabriela Barenboim, William H. Kinney, Wan-Il Park
[1811.11698] Eternal Inflation and the Refined Swampland Conjecture, by William H. Kinney

cosmology and nongalactic astrophysicsgeneral relativity and quantum cosmology

Audience: advanced learners

( paper | slides | video )

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CosmoConβ - Cosmology from Home

Series comments: Cosmology from Home is an online cosmology conference. One of its features are pre-recorded talks, publicly available at its YouTube channel.

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