Ultracompact Minihalos as Probes of Inflationary Cosmology.

Cosmological inflation generates primordial density perturbations on all scales, including those far too small to contribute to the cosmic microwave background. At these scales, isolated ultracompact minihalos of dark matter can form well before standard structure formation, if the perturbations have sufficient amplitude. Minihalos affect pulsar timing data and are potentially bright sources of gamma rays. The resulting constraints significantly extend the observable window of inflation in the presence of cold dark matter, coupling two of the key problems in modern cosmology.

Gravitational wave consistency relations for multifield inflation.

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∼[under ∑]iλ_{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 5σ level. This gives a novel and testable prediction for the simplest multifield inflation models.

Simple predictions from multifield inflationary models.

We explore whether multifield inflationary models make unambiguous predictions for fundamental cosmological observables. Focusing on N-quadratic inflation, we numerically evaluate the full perturbation equations for models with 2, 3, and O(100) fields, using several distinct methods for specifying the initial values of the background fields. All scenarios are highly predictive, with the probability distribution functions of the cosmological observables becoming more sharply peaked as N increases. For N=100 fields, 95% of our Monte Carlo samples fall in the ranges ns∈(0.9455,0.9534), α∈(-9.741,-7.047)×10-4, r∈(0.1445,0.1449), and riso∈(0.02137,3.510)×10-3 for the spectral index, running, tensor-to-scalar ratio, and isocurvature-to-adiabatic ratio, respectively. The expected amplitude of isocurvature perturbations grows with N, raising the possibility that many-field models may be sensitive to postinflationary physics and suggesting new avenues for testing these scenarios.