Polynomial Hybrid Inflation

Abstract

We study a simple extension of Linde's hybrid inflation model, with the inflaton mass term replaced by the most general renormalizable potential for $\phi$. The unprocessed power spectrum of density perturbations can have two minima and one maximum, roughly corresponding to two steep regions separated by a somewhat flat region in $V(\phi)$. In the examples studied here, sufficient amount of inflation and normalization to COBE require a vacuum scale of $10^{16}$ GeV and a $\phi$ mass of $10^{13}$ GeV. Depending on the initial value of $\phi$, our model can give either less ($\sim n<1$) or more ($\sim n>1$) power on small scales compared to the scale-invariant spectrum ($n=1$), given the normalization to COBE.