Initial conditions for slow-roll inflation in a random Gaussian landscape

Ali Masoumi, Alexander Vilenkin, Masaki Yamada

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

17 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In the landscape perspective, our Universe begins with a quantum tunneling from an eternally-inflating parent vacuum, followed by a period of slow-roll inflation. We investigate the tunneling process and calculate the probability distribution for the initial conditions and for the number of e-folds of slow-roll inflation, modeling the landscape by a small-field one-dimensional random Gaussian potential. We find that such a landscape is fully consistent with observations, but the probability for future detection of spatial curvature is rather low, P ∼ 10-3.

Original languageEnglish
Article number003
JournalJournal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Volume2017
Issue number7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • ination
  • initial conditions and eternal universe
  • string theory and cosmology

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