4.2. A worked example
The easiest way to see what is going on is to work through a specific example, the m22 / 2 potential which we already saw in Section 3.7. We'll see that we don't even have to solve the evolution equations to get our predictions.
Because the required value of m is so small, that means it is easy to get sufficient inflation to solve the cosmological problems if one only requires the classicality condition V < mPl4. Since that condition implies only that < mPl2 / m 106mPl, and as Ntot 22 / mPl2, we can get up to about 1013 e-foldings in principle. This compares extremely favourably with the 70 or so actually required.