Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2011-11-03
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
21 pages, 4 figures + tables
Scientific paper
We develop an approach for testing inflation models with multiple scalar fields by linking geometric and kinematical features of their inflationary Lagrangians to observable quantities like the power spectra, bispectrum, and trispectrum. Our approach also provides geometric intuition for when a complicated multi-field model can be well-approximated by a model with one, two, or a handful of fields. To arrive at these results, we focus on the mode interactions, simplify them using a novel result, and then explore how these interactions depend on the geometry of the inflationary Lagrangian and on the kinematics of the associated field trajectory. In the process, we introduce a multi-field observable \beta_2 that can potentially distinguish two-field scenarios from scenarios involving three or more effective fields. We also present a multi-field consistency relation, which involves the primordial bispectrum parameter f_{NL}, trispectrum parameter \tau_{NL}, and other spectral observables. These combined results provide better intuition into how features in multi-field inflationary Lagrangians translate into cosmic observables.
Peterson Courtney M.
Tegmark Max
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