English

Inflation in random Gaussian landscapes

High Energy Physics - Theory 2017-06-14 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

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 nsn_s and its running αs\alpha_s. 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.

Keywords

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

R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:21:38.022Z