Whipped inflation

Abstract

Motivated by the idea that inflation occurs at the GUT symmetry breaking scale, in this paper we construct a new class of large field inflaton potentials where the inflaton starts with a power law potential; after initial period of relative fast roll that lasts until after a few e-folds inside the horizon, it transits to the attractor of the slow roll part of the potential with a lower power. Due to the initial fast roll stages of inflation, we find a suppression in scalar primordial power at large scales and at the same time the choice of the potential can provide us a tensor primordial spectrum with high amplitude. This suppression in scalar power with a large tensor-to-scalar ratio helps us to reconcile the Planck and BICEP2 data in a single framework. We find that a transition from a cubic to quadratic form of inflaton potential generates an appropriate suppression in power of scalar primordial spectrum that provides significant improvement in fit compared to power law model when compared with Planck and BICEP2 data together. We calculate the extent of non-Gaussianity, specifically, the bispectrum for the best fit potential and show that it is consistent with Planck bispectrum constraints.