Squared Quartic Hilltop Inflation

Hoffmann, Joshua and Sloan, David (2021) Squared Quartic Hilltop Inflation. Physical Review D, 104 (12): 123542. ISSN 1550-7998

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Abstract

A correction to the quartic hilltop inflationary model is proposed to account for stabilizing terms in the potential. We derive analytical predictions for the spectral index n s and tensor-scalar ratio r which lie within the Planck 2018 survey bounds. The reheating predictions of the corrected model are investigated and by considering the reheating temperature we further constrain the ( n s , r ) parameter space. It is shown that the correction terms are physically important during inflation and generally need to be accounted for when considering hilltop models as a candidate for inflation.