The Palatini side of inflationary attractors

Understand

We perform an analysis of models of chaotic inflation where the inflaton field $\phi$ is coupled non-minimally to gravity via $\xi \phi^n g^{\mu\nu}R_{\mu\nu}(\Gamma), n>0$.

• We focus on the Palatini theory of gravity, i.e.
• the case where the assumptions of the General Relativity are relaxed (that of the connection being the Levi-Civita one) and the gravitational degrees of freedom are encoded not only in the metric but also the connection $\Gamma$, which is treated as an independent variable.
• We show that in this case the famous attractor behaviour of simple non-minimally coupled models of inflation is lost.