Mass hierarchies and non-decoupling in multi-scalar field dynamics
By A. Ach'ucarro, Jinn-Ouk Gong, S. Hardeman, G. Palma, S. Patil. 2010
180 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In this work we study the effects of field space curvature on scalar field perturbations around an arbitrary background field trajectory evolving in time. Non-trivial imprints of the 'heavy' directions on the low energy dynamics arise when the vacuum manifold of the potential does not coincide with the span of geodesics defined by the sigma model metric of the full theory. When the kinetic energy is small compared to the potential energy, the field traverses a curve close to the vacuum manifold of the potential. The curvature of the path followed by the fields can still have a profound influence on the perturbations as modes parallel to the trajectory mix with those normal to it if the trajectory turns sharply enough. We analyze the dynamical mixing between these non-decoupled degrees of freedom and deduce its non-trivial contribution to the low energy effective theory for the light modes. We also discuss the consequences of this mixing for various scenarios where multiple scalar fields play a vital role, such as inflation and low-energy compactifications of string theory.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e528e117a2bf4bdd14b18b84b927fb605e16c81a
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
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Inflation and String Theory (2014, background): “(Analyses of the effects of heavy fields include [493, 496, 505, 506].”
- Effective theories of single field inflation when heavy fields matter (2012, background): “3) along Na, it is possible to derive an identity determining θ̇ in terms of the slope of the potential VN ≡ NVa along the normal direction [10, 11]”