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.
