Power suppression of the cosmic microwave background on the largest observable scales could provide valuable clues about the particle physics underlying inflation. Here we consider the prospect of power suppression in the context of the multifield la
ndscape. Based on the assumption that our observable universe emerges from a tunnelling event and that the relevant features originate purely from inflationary dynamics, we find that the power spectrum not only contains information on single-field dynamics, but also places strong con- straints on all scalar fields present in the theory. We find that the simplest single-field models giving rise to power suppression do not generalise to multifield models in a straightforward way, as the resulting superhorizon evolution of the curvature perturbation tends to erase any power suppression present at horizon crossing. On the other hand, multifield effects do present a means of generating power suppression which to our knowledge has so far not been considered. We propose a mechanism to illustrate this, which we dub flume inflation.
We give an explicit relation, up to second-order terms, between scalar-field fluctuations defined on spatially-flat slices and the curvature perturbation on uniform-density slices. This expression is a necessary ingredient for calculating observable
quantities at second-order and beyond in multiple-field inflation. We show that traditional cosmological perturbation theory and the `separate universe approach yield equivalent expressions for superhorizon wavenumbers, and in particular that all nonlocal terms can be eliminated from the perturbation-theory expressions.
We present MultiModeCode, a Fortran 95/2000 package for the numerical exploration of multifield inflation models. This program facilitates efficient Monte Carlo sampling of prior probabilities for inflationary model parameters and initial conditions
and is the first publicly available code that can efficiently generate large sample-sets for inflation models with $mathcal O(100)$ fields. The code numerically solves the equations of motion for the background and first-order perturbations of multi-field inflation models with canonical kinetic terms and arbitrary potentials, providing the adiabatic, isocurvature, and tensor power spectra at the end of inflation. For models with sum-separable potentials MultiModeCode also computes the slow-roll prediction via the $delta N$ formalism for easy model exploration and validation. We pay particular attention to the isocurvature perturbations as the system approaches the adiabatic limit, showing how to avoid numerical instabilities that affect some other approaches to this problem. We demonstrate the use of MultiModeCode by exploring a few toy models. Finally, we give a concise review of multifield perturbation theory and a users manual for the program.
We explore whether multifield inflationary models make unambiguous predictions for fundamental cosmological observables. Focusing on $N$-quadratic inflation, we numerically evaluate the full perturbation equations for models with 2, 3, and $mathcal{O
}(100)$ fields, using several distinct methods for specifying the initial values of the background fields. All scenarios are highly predictive, with the probability distribution functions of the cosmological observables becoming more sharply peaked as $N$ increases. For $N=100$ fields, 95% of our Monte Carlo samples fall in the ranges $n_s in (0.9455,0.9534)$; $alpha in (-9.741,-7.047)times 10^{-4}$; $rin(0.1445,0.1449)$; and $r_mathrm{iso} in (0.02137,3.510)times 10^{-3}$ for the spectral index, running, tensor-to-scalar ratio, and isocurvature-to-adiabatic ratio, respectively. The expected amplitude of isocurvature perturbations grows with $N$, raising the possibility that many-field models may be sensitive to post-inflationary physics and suggesting new avenues for testing these scenarios.
