The geometry of inflationary observables: lifts, flows, equivalence classes

Abstract

The Eisenhart lift allows to formulate the dynamics of a scalar field in a potential as pure geodesic motion in a curved field-space manifold involving an additional fictitious vector field. Making use of the formalism in the context of inflation, we show that the main inflationary observables can be expressed in terms of the geometrical properties of a two-dimensional uplifted field-space manifold spanned by the time derivatives of the scalar and the temporal component of the vector. This allows to abstract from specific potentials and models and describe inflation solely in terms of the flow of geometric quantities. Our findings are illustrated through several inflationary examples previously considered in the literature.