Non-Canonical Inflation in Supergravity

Understand

We investigate the effect of non-canonical kinetic terms on inflation in supergravity.

• We find that the biggest impact of such higher-derivative kinetic terms is due to the corrections to the potential that they induce via their effect on the auxiliary fields, which now have a cubic equation of motion.
• This is in contrast to the usual (non-supersymmetric) effective field theory expansion which assumes that mass-suppressed higher-derivative terms do not affect the lower-derivative terms already present.
• We demonstrate with several examples that such changes in the potential can significantly modify the inflationary dynamics.