A crucial ingredient of inflation

Nonminimal coupling of the inflaton field to the Ricci curvature of spacetime is generally unavoidable, and the paradigm of inflation should be generalized by including the corresponding term xi R phi (2)/2 in the Lagrangian of the inflationary theory. This paper reports on the status of the programme of generalizing inflation. First, the problem of finding the correct value (or set of values) of the coupling constant xi is analyzed; the result has important consequences for the success or failure of inflationary scenarios. Then, the slow-roll approximation to generalized inflation is studied. Both the unperturbed inflating universe models and scalar/tensor perturbations are discussed, and open problems are pointed out.