The phase transition to eternal inflation

By P. Creminelli, S. Dubovsky, Alberto Nicolis, L. Senatore, M. Zaldarriaga. 2008

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For slow-roll inflation we study the phase transition to the eternal regime. Starting from a finite inflationary volume, we consider the volume of the universe at reheating as order parameter. We show that there exists a critical value for the classical inflaton speed, 2/H4 = 3/(2π2), where the probability distribution for the reheating volume undergoes a sharp transition. In particular, for sub-critical inflaton speeds all distribution moments become infinite. We show that at the same transition point the system develops a non-vanishing probability of having a strictly infinite reheating volume, while retaining a finite probability for finite values. Our analysis represents the exact quantum treatment of the system at lowest order in the slow-roll parameters and H2/MPl2.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a14875e320b8e0c5598834522e90b0ef8c6aacd9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Kiwoon Choi
2. C. Byrnes
3. D. Seery
4. D. Wands
5. S. Young

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Kiwoon Choi
2. C. Byrnes
3. D. Wands
4. S. Young

Citations in the corpus

• Review of local non-Gaussianity from multi-field inflation (2010, methodology): “For this, we require that r̃ 1, although in practice if we make it too small it may no longer be possible to satisfy a constraint on a minimum possible field velocity consistent with a classical slow-roll trajectory, as discussed in [95] (see also [136] and a discussion which reaches a different con”