Generality of Starobinsky and Higgs inflation in the Jordan frame

Abstract

We revisit the problem of generality of Starobinsky and Higgs inflation. The known results obtained in the Einstein frame are generalized for the case of an arbitrary initial energy of the scalar field. These results are compared with the results obtained directly in the Jordan frame, which, to our knowledge, has not been thoroughly explored in the literature previously. We demonstrate that the qualitative picture of initial conditions zone in the $(\phi, \dot \phi)$ plane, which leads to sufficient amount of inflation, is quite similar for both the frames in the case of Higgs inflation. For Starobinsky inflation, the conformal transformation between the frames relates the geometrical variables in the Jordan frame with the properties of an effective scalar field in the Einstein frame. We show that the transformation $(H, R) \to (\phi, \dot \phi)$ is not regular everywhere, leading to some peculiarities in the zone of good initial conditions in the $(H, R)$ plane.