No Arabic abstract
Non-adiabatic pressure perturbations naturally occur in models of inflation consisting of more than one scalar field. The amount of non-adiabatic pressure present at the end of inflation can have observational consequences through changes in the curvature perturbation, the generation of vorticity and subsequently the sourcing of B-mode polarisation. In this work, based on a presentation at the 13th Marcel Grossmann Meeting, we give a very brief overview of non-adiabatic pressure perturbations in multi-field inflationary models and describe our recent calculation of the spectrum of isocurvature perturbations generated at the end of inflation for different models which have two scalar fields.
Isocurvature perturbations naturally occur in models of inflation consisting of more than one scalar field. In this paper we calculate the spectrum of isocurvature perturbations generated at the end of inflation for three different inflationary models consisting of two canonical scalar fields. The amount of non-adiabatic pressure present at the end of inflation can have observational consequences through the generation of vorticity and subsequently the sourcing of B-mode polarisation. We compare two different definitions of isocurvature perturbations and show how these quantities evolve in different ways during inflation. Our results are calculated using the open source Pyflation numerical package which is available to download.
How much does the curvature perturbation change after it leaves the horizon, and when should one evaluate the power spectrum? To answer these questions we study single field inflation models numerically, and compare the evolution of different curvature perturbations from horizon crossing to the end of inflation. In particular we calculate the number of efolds it takes for the curvature perturbation at a given wavenumber to settle down to within a given fraction of their value at the end of inflation. We find that e.g. in chaotic inflation, the amplitude of the comoving and the curvature perturbation on uniform density hypersurfaces differ by up to 180 % at horizon crossing assuming the same amplitude at the end of inflation, and that it takes approximately 3 efolds for the curvature perturbation to be within 1 % of its value at the end of inflation.
We numerically calculate the evolution of second order cosmological perturbations for an inflationary scalar field without resorting to the slow-roll approximation or assuming large scales. In contrast to previous approaches we therefore use the full non-slow-roll source term for the second order Klein-Gordon equation which is valid on all scales. The numerical results are consistent with the ones obtained previously where slow-roll is a good approximation. We investigate the effect of localised features in the scalar field potential which break slow-roll for some portion of the evolution. The numerical package solving the second order Klein-Gordon equation has been released under an open source license and is available for download.
We develop a non-linear framework for describing long-wavelength perturbations in multiple-field inflation. The basic variables describing inhomogeneities are defined in a non-perturbative manner, are invariant under changes of time slicing on large scales and include both matter and metric perturbations. They are combinations of spatial gradients generalising the gauge-invariant variables of linear theory. Dynamical equations are derived and supplemented with stochastic source terms which provide the long-wavelength initial conditions determined from short-wavelength modes. Solutions can be readily obtained via numerical simulations or analytic perturbative expansions. The latter are much simpler than the usual second-order perturbation theory. Applications are given in a companion paper.
We study the evolution of non-Gaussianity in multiple-field inflationary models, focusing on three fundamental questions: (a) How is the sign and peak magnitude of the non-linearity parameter fNL related to generic features in the inflationary potential? (b) How sensitive is fNL to the process by which an adiabatic limit is reached, where the curvature perturbation becomes conserved? (c) For a given model, what is the appropriate tool -- analytic or numerical -- to calculate fNL at the adiabatic limit? We summarise recent results obtained by the authors and further elucidate them by considering an inflection point model.