A Hamilton-Jacobi approach to non-slow-roll inflation

Abstract

I describe a general approach to characterizing cosmological inflation outside the standard slow-roll approximation, based on the Hamilton-Jacobi formulation of scalar field dynamics. The basic idea is to view the equation of state of the scalar field matter as the fundamental dynamical variable, as opposed to the field value or the expansion rate. I discuss how to formulate the equations of motion for scalar and tensor fluctuations in situations where the assumption of slow roll is not valid. I apply the general results to the simple case of inflation from an ``inverted'' polynomial potential, and to the more complicated case of hybrid inflation.