# What is chaotic about Chaotic Inflation?

Chaos is defined as an aperiodic long-termed behavior, that is very sensitive to initial conditions.

Now from this definition I can only conclude that the adjective 'chaos' is a mere analogy, since there is nothing aperiodic (or periodic) during inflation. The inflaton follows a nice, smooth (often taken to be a quadratic) potential.

Furthermore the initial conditions are essentially that $$\ddot{\phi}\approx 0 \quad \text{and}\quad \dot{\phi}\text{ is small},$$ shows that these are not very stringent wrt to the final result: at whatever 'speed' you begin, as long as it small enough it is ok....

• I believe it is the massive quantum fluctuations which give this rather misleading name to a property of spacetime in regions with no reasonable analytical manifold. – GRrocks May 29 '14 at 14:51

For what i remember a chaotic inflation potential would be of the form $$\sim\lambda\varphi^4$$ and when $\lambda<<1$ you essentially have a flat potential where no points seems to be favorite as starting point for slow roll.