Rapid roll Inflation with Conformal Coupling

Usual inflation is realized with a slow rolling scalar field minimally coupled to gravity. In contrast, we consider dynamics of a scalar with a flat effective potential, conformally coupled to gravity. Surprisingly, it contains an attractor inflationary solution with the rapidly rolling inflaton field. We discuss models with the conformal inflaton with a flat potential (including hybrid inflation). There is no generation of cosmological fluctuations from the conformally coupled inflaton. We consider realizations of modulated (inhomogeneous reheating) or curvaton cosmological fluctuations in these models. We also implement these unusual features for the popular string-theoretic warped inflationary scenario, based on the interacting D3-anti D3 branes. The original warped brane inflation suffers a large inflaton mass due to conformal coupling to 4-dimensional gravity. Instead of considering this as a problem and trying to cure it with extra engineering, we show that warped inflation with the conformally coupled, rapidly rolling inflaton is yet possible with N=37 efoldings, which requires low energy scales 1-100 TeV of inflation. Coincidentally, the same warping numerology can be responsible for the hierarchy. It is shown that the scalars associated with angular isometries of the warped geometry of compact manifold (e.g. S^3 of KS geometry) have solutions identical to conformally coupled modes and also cannot be responsible for cosmological fluctuations. We discuss other possibilities.Comment: 15 pages, version accepted for publication in PR

On the better behaved version of the GKZ hypergeometric system

We consider a version of the generalized hypergeometric system introduced by Gelfand, Kapranov and Zelevinski (GKZ) suited for the case when the underlying lattice is replaced by a finitely generated abelian group. In contrast to the usual GKZ hypergeometric system, the rank of the better behaved GKZ hypergeometric system is always the expected one. We give largely self-contained proofs of many properties of this system. The discussion is intimately related to the study of the variations of Hodge structures of hypersurfaces in algebraic tori.Comment: LaTex, 22 pages; v2 is a major revision: the introduction, sections 4 and 5 have been changed; section 5 is new; v3 published versio