M-flation and its spectators
  M-flation is an implementation of assisted inflation, in which the inflaton
fields are three N_c x N_c non-abelian hermitean matrices. The model can be
consistently truncated to an effectively single field inflation model, with all
``spectator'' fields fixed at the origin. We show that starting with random
initial conditions for all fields the truncated sector is not a late-time
attractor, but instead the system evolves towards quadratic assisted inflation
with all fields mass degenerate. Demanding the energy density during inflation
to be below the effective quantum gravity scale, we find that the number of
fields, and thus the assisted effect, is bounded N_c < 10^2.
