Why Does Inflation Look Single Field to Us?

Most high-energy constructions that realize a phase of cosmic inflation contain many degrees of freedom. Yet, cosmological observations are all consistent with single-field embeddings. We show how volume selection effects explain this apparent paradox.

Massive Galaxy Clusters Like El Gordo Hint at Primordial Quantum Diffusion.

It is generally assumed within the standard cosmological model that initial density perturbations are Gaussian at all scales. However, primordial quantum diffusion unavoidably generates non-Gaussian, exponential tails in the distribution of inflationary perturbations. These exponential tails have direct consequences for the formation of collapsed structures in the Universe, as has been studied in the context of primordial black holes.

Cosmic Microwave Background Constraints Cast a Shadow On Continuous Spontaneous Localization Models.

The continuous spontaneous localization model solves the measurement problem of standard quantum mechanics by coupling the mass density of a quantum system to a white-noise field. Since the mass density is not uniquely defined in general relativity, this model is ambiguous when applied to cosmology. We however show that most natural choices of the density contrast already make current measurements of the cosmic microwave background incompatible with other laboratory experiments.

Critical Number of Fields in Stochastic Inflation.

Stochastic effects in generic scenarios of inflation with multiple fields are investigated. First passage time techniques are employed to calculate the statistical moments of the number of inflationary e-folds, which give rise to all correlation functions of primordial curvature perturbations through the stochastic δN formalism. The number of fields is a critical parameter.

Observing inflationary reheating.

Reheating is the epoch which connects inflation to the subsequent hot big-bang phase. Conceptually very important, this era is, however, observationally poorly known. We show that the current Planck satellite measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies constrain the kinematic properties of the reheating era for most of the inflationary models.