Random matrices and the spectrum of N-flation
By R. Easther, Liam McAllister. 2005
179 citations recorded by the source corpus.
N-flation is a promising embedding of inflation in string theory in which many string axions combine to drive inflation. We characterize the dynamics of a general N-flation model with nondegenerate axion masses. Although the precise mass of a single axion depends on compactification details in a complicated way, the distribution of masses can be computed with very limited knowledge of microscopics: the shape of the mass distribution is an emergent property. We use random matrix theory to show that a typical N-flation model has a spectrum of masses distributed according to the Marčenko–Pastur law. This distribution depends on a single parameter, the number of axions divided by the dimension of the moduli space. We use this result to describe the inflationary dynamics and phenomenology of a general N-flation model. We produce an ensemble of models and use numerical integration to track the axions’ evolution and the resulting scalar power spectrum. For realistic initial conditions, the power spectrum is considerably more red than in single-field m2ϕ2 inflation. We conclude that random matrix models of N-flation are surprisingly tractable and have a rich phenomenology that differs in testable ways from that of single-field m2ϕ2 inflation.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a292d612c47f75b956db530c351fc84f21309903
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Citations in the corpus
- A review of axion inflation in the era of Planck (2013, methodology): “A detailed analysis of a more general case was carried out in [33] using random matrix theory tools and information from realistic string theory constructions.”
- Axion inflation in type II string theory (2007, background): “38 83 Inflationary models driven by a large number of axion fields are discussed in the context of type IIB compactifications with N = 1 supersymmetry.”
- Inflation and String Theory (2014, background): “a simple expression for the axion mass spectrum [483].”
- Inflationary Constraints on Type IIA String Theory (2007, background): “For this reason, the past few years have seen intense investigation into the possibility of inflation driven by closed string moduli [16, 17, 18, 19, 20], axions [21, 22, 23, 24, 25], or D-brane positions [26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31] in the extra dimensions.”
- Gauge-preheating and the end of axion inflation (2015, methodology): “Model builders sought to circumvent this obstruction in a model dubbed N -flation [9–11] by using a large number of axions, each with small periodicities, to implement assisted inflation [12].”
- Simple exercises to flatten your potential (2010, background): “The string theory motivated possibility of many additional light fields assisting inflation has been addressed in works such as [9], and the tendency of particle production to slow down the inflaton was analyzed in [10].”
- Non-Gaussianities in multi-field inflation (2006, background): “In particular, the non-Gaussianities in single field models are typically tiny [9]–[13], but they can be larger in general multi-field models, so computing them is an important step towards developing a full understanding of N-flation5.”
- Phenomenology of a pseudo-scalar inflaton: naturally large nongaussianity (2011, background): “The idea of using a PNGB as inflaton was first put forward in [6]; in this minimal realization a single axion is present; it turns out that this model can produce a sufficiently flat spectrum of perturbations only if the axion decay constant f is above the Planck scale.”