Inflation in random Gaussian landscapes
Abstract
We develop analytic and numerical techniques for studying the statistics of slow-roll inflation in random Gaussian landscapes. As an illustration of these techniques, we analyze small-field inflation in a one-dimensional landscape. We calculate the probability distributions for the maximal number of e-folds and for the spectral index of density fluctuations and its running . These distributions have a universal form, insensitive to the correlation function of the Gaussian ensemble. We outline possible extensions of our methods to a large number of fields and to models of large-field inflation. These methods do not suffer from potential inconsistencies inherent in the Brownian motion technique, which has been used in most of the earlier treatments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1612.03960,
title = {Inflation in random Gaussian landscapes},
author = {Ali Masoumi and Alexander Vilenkin and Masaki Yamada},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.03960},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
25 pages, 6 figures