Monte Carlo reconstruction of the inflationary potential

The PLANCK collaboration has determined values for the spectral parameters of the CMB radiation, namely the spectral index $n_s$, its running $\alpha_s$, the running of the running $\beta_s$, using a growing body of measurements of CMB anisotropies by the Planck satellite and other missions. These values do not follow the hierarchy of sizes predicted by single field, slow roll inflationary theory, and are thus difficult to fit for such inflation models. In this work we pres...

I explore properties of the inflationary flow equations. I show that the flow equations do not correspond directly to inflationary dynamics. Nevertheless, they can be used as a rather complicated algorithm for generating inflationary models. I demonstrate that the flow equations can be solved analytically and give a closed form solution for the potentials to which flow equation solutions correspond. I end by considering some simpler algorithms for generating stochastic sets o...

The current flow of high accuracy astrophysical data, among which are the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) measurements by the Planck satellite, offers an unprecedented opportunity to constrain the inflationary theory. This is however a challenging project given the size of the inflationary landscape which contains hundreds of different scenarios. Given that there is currently no observational evidence for primordial non-Gaussianities, isocurvature perturbations or any other...

We introduce a numerical method specifically designed for investigating generic multifield models of inflation where a number of scalar fields $\phi^K$ are minimally coupled to gravity and live in a field space with a non-trivial metric $G_{IJ}(\phi^K)$. Our algorithm consists of three main parts. Firstly, we solve the field equations through the entire inflationary period, deriving predictions for observable quantities such as the spectrum of scalar perturbations, primordial...

We suggest a new method to reconstruct, within canonical single-field inflation, the inflaton potential directly from the primordial power spectrum which may deviate significantly from near scale-invariance. Our approach relies on a more generalized slow-roll approximation than the standard one, and can probe the properties of the inflaton potential reliably. We give a few examples for reconstructing potential and discuss the validity of our method.

I examine the status of inflationary cosmology in light of the first-year data from the WMAP satellite, focusing on the simplest models of inflation: those driven by a single scalar field. The WMAP observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background is the first unified, self-consistent data set capable of putting meaningful constraints on the inflationary parameter space. WMAP provides significant support for the inflationary paradigm in general, and single-field slow-roll inflat...

Recent fits of cosmological parameters by the first year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) measurement seem to favor a primordial scalar spectrum with a large varying index from blue to red. We use the inflationary flow equations to reconstruct large running-index inflaton potentials and comment on current status on the inflationary flow. We find previous negligence of higher order slow rolling contributions when using the flow equations would lead to unprecise resu...

Inflation is a highly favoured theory for the early Universe. It is compatible with current observations of the cosmic microwave background and large scale structure and is a driver in the quest to detect primordial gravitational waves. It is also, given the current quality of the data, highly under-determined with a large number of candidate implementations. We use a new method in symbolic regression to generate all possible simple scalar field potentials for one of two poss...

In this paper, we present quantitative constraints on the scalar field potential for a general class of inflationary models. (1) We first consider the reconstruction of the inflationary potential for given primordial density fluctuation spectra. Our work differs from previous work on reconstruction in that we find a semi-analytic solution for the potential for the case of density fluctuations with power-law spectra. In addition, for the case of more general spectra, we show h...

We examine cosmological inflation in a broad family of scalar-tensor models characterized by scalar-dependent non minimal kinetic couplings and Gauss-Bonnet terms. Using a slow roll-approximation, we compute in detail theoretical expectations of observables as spectral indexes, scalar-to-tensor ratio, their running and their running of the running in terms of the parameters which characterize the scalar-tensor model. Hierarchies of consistency equations relating scalar and te...