Speaker
Description
Models of inflation with multiple scalar fields are well-motivated from supergravity and string theory. However, the steep potential gradients often seen in these models naively violate the slow-roll criteria employed in single-field inflation. Multi-field solutions that rapidly turn in field space can achieve sustained slow-roll inflation in such models, but criteria for turning trajectories only exist for the case of two fields. In this talk, I will generalize these criteria to an arbitrary number of fields and quantify the extreme turning limit, in which rapid-turn solutions may be found efficiently via a variety of newly-developed methods. These methods reproduce the inflationary solutions in known rapid-turn models and can be used to search string constructions for rapid-turn trajectories. For the first time, we are able to efficiently search for these solutions and even exclude slow-roll, rapid-turn inflation from one string-derived potential.
