N-flation is a radiatively stable scenario for chaotic inflation in which the displacements of N≫1 axions with decay constants f1≤…≤fN<MP lead to a super-Planckian effective displacement equal to the Pythagorean sum fPy of the fi. We show that mixing in the axion kinetic term generically leads to the phenomenon of kinetic alignment, allowing for effective displacements as large as N−−√fN≥fPy, even if f1,…,fN−1 are arbitrarily small. At the level of kinematics, the necessary alignment occurs with very high probability, because of eigenvector delocalization. We present conditions under which inflation can take place along an aligned direction. Our construction sharply reduces the challenge of realizing N-flation in string theory
