Universality class in conformal inflation

We develop a new class of chaotic inflation models with spontaneously broken conformal invari-ance. Observational consequences of a broad class of such models are stable with respect to strong deformations of the scalar potential. This universality is a critical phenomenon near the point of enhanced symmetry, SO(1, 1), in case of conformal inflation. It appears because of the exponential stretching of the moduli space and the resulting exponential flattening of scalar potentials upon switching from the Jordan frame to the Einstein frame in this class of models. This result resembles stretching and flattening of inhomogeneities during inflationary expansion. It has a simple inter-pretation in terms of velocity…