Frame covariant nonminimal multifield inflation

2017

We introduce a frame-covariant formalism for inflation of scalar-curvature theories by adopting a differential geometric approach which treats the scalar fields as coordinates living on a field-space manifold. This ensures that our description of inflation is both conformally and reparameterization covariant. Our formulation gives rise to extensions of the usual Hubble and potential slow-roll parameters to generalized fully frame-covariant forms, which allow us to provide manifestly frame-invariant predictions for cosmological observables, such as the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$, the spectral indices $n_{\cal R}$ and $n_T$, their runnings $\alpha_{\cal R}$ and $\alpha_T$, the non-Gaussianity…