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

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Published 3 July 2017 © 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab
, , Citation Ali Masoumi et al JCAP07(2017)003 DOI 10.1088/1475-7516/2017/07/003

1475-7516/2017/07/003

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.

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10.1088/1475-7516/2017/07/003