Price, LC; Peiris, HV; Frazer, J; Easther, R; (2015) Gravitational Wave Consistency Relations for Multifield Inflation. Physical Review Letters , 114 , Article 031301. 10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.031301.

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Abstract

We study the tensor spectral index n t and the tensor-to-scalar ratio r in the simplest multifield extension to single-field, slow-roll inflation models. We show that multifield models with potentials V ∼ ∑ i λ i | ϕ i | p have different predictions for n t / r than single-field models, even when all the couplings are equal λ i = λ j , due to the probabilistic nature of the fields’ initial values. We analyze well-motivated prior probabilities for the λ i and initial conditions to make detailed predictions for the marginalized probability distribution of n t / r . With O ( 100 ) fields and p > 3 / 4 , we find that n t / r differs from the single-field result of n t / r = − 1 / 8 at the 5 σ level. This gives a novel and testable prediction for the simplest multifield inflation models.

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