English

Initial conditions for slow-roll inflation in a random Gaussian landscape

High Energy Physics - Theory 2017-07-19 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

In the landscape perspective, our Universe begins with a quantum tunneling from an eternally-inflating parent vacuum, followed by a period of slow-roll inflation. We investigate the tunneling process and calculate the probability distribution for the initial conditions and for the number of e-folds of slow-roll inflation, modeling the landscape by a small-field one-dimensional random Gaussian potential. We find that such a landscape is fully consistent with observations, but the probability for future detection of spatial curvature is rather low, P103P \sim 10^{-3}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.06994,
  title  = {Initial conditions for slow-roll inflation in a random Gaussian landscape},
  author = {Ali Masoumi and Alexander Vilenkin and Masaki Yamada},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.06994},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

24 pages, 13 figures; (v2) minor changes, an appendix explaining new features of tunneling added