Inflation by Alignment
  Pseudo-Goldstone bosons (pGBs) can provide technically natural inflatons, as
has been comparatively well-explored in the simplest axion examples. Although
inflationary success requires trans-Planckian decay constants, f > Mp, several
mechanisms have been proposed to obtain this, relying on (mis-)alignments
between potential and kinetic energies in multiple-field models. We extend
these mechanisms to a broader class of inflationary models, including in
particular the exponential potentials that arise for pGB potentials based on
noncompact groups (and so which might apply to moduli in an extra-dimensional
setting). The resulting potentials provide natural large-field inflationary
models and can predict a larger primordial tensor signal than is true for
simpler single-field versions of these models. In so doing we provide a unified
treatment of several alignment mechanisms, showing how each emerges as a limit
of the more general setup.
