Anisotropic Power-law Inflation: A counter example to the cosmic no-hair conjecture

Abstract

It is widely believed that anisotropy in the expansion of the universe will decay exponentially fast during inflation. This is often referred to as the cosmic no-hair conjecture. However, we find a counter example to the cosmic no-hair conjecture in the context of supergravity. As a demonstration, we present an exact anisotropic power-law inflationary solution which is an attractor in the phase space. We emphasize that anisotropic inflation is quite generic in the presence of anisotropic sources which couple with an inflaton.