Power-law inflation

The outstanding cosmological problems (horizon, flatness,. . . ) which may be solved by the usual inflationary models may also find a solution in the frame of a ``generalized'' inflationary cosmology which is characterized by a suitable phase of accelerated expansion. The usual exponential growth of the scale factor S is just a particular case of such a general idea. Following this line of thought, we study in some detail a simple inflationary model characterized by a scale factor which grows like St^p, with p a constant greater than one, which we call power-law inflation (PLI). Some properties of PLI have been analyzed, in different contexts, also by other authors. We consider the constraints on this model coming from the requirement of solving the horizon, flatness, ``good'' reheating, and ``convenient'' perturbation-spectrum problems. In order to obtain the perturbation spectrum when re-entering the horizon during the Friedmann phase, we extend to PLI the gauge-invariant approach developed by Bardeen et al. for the usual inflationary models. We find that the above constraints can be suitably satisfied. Finally, we outline possible connections between PLI and particular inflationary models which have recently been proposed.