English

The Large Number Limit of Multifield Inflation

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2017-12-21 v2

Abstract

We compute the tensor and scalar spectral index ntn_t, nsn_s, the tensor-to-scalar ratio rr, the consistency relation nt/rn_t/r in the general monomial multifield slow-roll inflation models with potentials ViλiϕipiV \sim\sum_i\lambda_i \left|\phi_i\right|^{p_i}. The general models give a novel relation that ntn_t, nsn_s and nt/rn_t/r are all proportional to the logarithm of the number of fields NfN_f when NfN_f is getting extremely large with the order of magnitude around O(1040)\mathcal{O}(10^{40}). An upper bound NfNeZNN_f\lesssim N_*e^{ZN_*} is given by requiring the slow variation parameter small enough where NN_* is the e-folding number and ZZ is a function of distributions of λi\lambda_i and pip_i. Besides, nt/rn_t/r differs from the single-field result 1/8-1/8 with substantial probability except for a few very special cases. Finally, we derive theoretical bounds r>2/Nr>2/N_* (r0.03r\gtrsim0.03) and for ntn_t which can be tested by observation in the near future.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1708.06136,
  title  = {The Large Number Limit of Multifield Inflation},
  author = {Zhong-Kai Guo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.06136},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

7 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:19:19.618Z