English

Non-Gaussianities in N-flation

High Energy Physics - Theory 2010-10-27 v3 Astrophysics

Abstract

We compute non-Gaussianities in N-flation, a string motivated model of assisted inflation with quadratic, separable potentials and masses given by the Marcenko-Pastur distribution. After estimating parameters characterizing the bi- and trispectrum in the horizon crossing approximation, we focus on the non-linearity parameter fNLf_{NL}, a measure of the bispectrum; we compute its magnitude for narrow and broad spreads of masses, including the evolution of modes after horizon crossing. We identify additional contributions due to said evolution and show that they are suppressed as long as the fields are evolving slowly. This renders N\mathcal{N}-flation indistinguishable from simple single-field models in this regime. Larger non-Gaussianities are expected to arise for fields that start to evolve faster, and we suggest an analytic technique to estimate their contribution. However, such fast roll during inflation is not expected in N-flation, leaving (p)re-heating as the main additional candidate for generating non-Gaussianities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0703012,
  title  = {Non-Gaussianities in N-flation},
  author = {Diana Battefeld and Thorsten Battefeld},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0703012},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

27 pages, 4 figures, extended references to match version accepted in JCAP

R2 v1 2026-07-22T15:41:07.956Z