Squared quartic hilltop inflation

Abstract

A correction to the Quartic Hilltop inflationary model is proposed to account for stabilising terms in the potential. We derive analytical predictions for the spectral index $n_s$ and tensor-scalar ratio $r$ which lie within the Planck 2018 survey bounds. The reheating predictions of the corrected model are investigated and by considering the reheating temperature we further constrain the $(n_s,r)$ parameter space. It is shown that the correction terms are physically important during inflation and generally need to be accounted for when considering Hilltop models as a candidate for inflation.