Landscape of modular cosmology

Abstract

Abstract We investigate the global structure of the recently discovered family of SL(2,ℤ)-invariant potentials describing inflationary α-attractors. These potentials have an inflationary plateau consisting of the fundamental domain and its images fully covering the upper part of the Poincaré half-plane. Meanwhile, the lower part of the half-plane is covered by an infinitely large number of ridges, which, at first glance, are too sharp to support inflation. However, we show that this apparent sharpness is just an illusion created by hyperbolic geometry, and each of these ridges is physically equivalent to the inflationary plateau in the upper part of the Poincaré half-plane.

Topics & Concepts