Primordial perturbations and non-Gaussianities in DBI and general multi-field inflation

TL;DR

This paper analyzes cosmological perturbations in multi-field inflation models, especially DBI inflation, revealing how adiabatic and entropy modes propagate and contribute to primordial non-Gaussianities, with implications for early universe cosmology.

Contribution

It provides the most general second- and third-order actions for perturbations in multi-field inflation, including DBI models, and elucidates the behavior of sound speeds and non-Gaussianities.

Findings

Adiabatic and entropy modes share a common sound speed in multi-field DBI inflation.

Entropy modes dominate over adiabatic modes at small sound speeds.

Non-Gaussianities depend on both adiabatic and entropy modes in DBI inflation.

Abstract

We study cosmological perturbations in general inflation models with multiple scalar fields and arbitrary kinetic terms, with special emphasis on the multi-field extension of Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) inflation. We compute the second-order action governing the dynamics of linear perturbations in the most general case. Specializing to DBI, we show that the adiabatic and entropy modes propagate with a {\it common} effective sound speed and are thus amplified at sound horizon crossing. In the small sound speed limit, we find that the amplitude of the entropy modes is much higher than that of the adiabatic modes. We also derive, in the general case, the third-order action which is useful for studying primordial non-Gaussianities generated during inflation. In the DBI case, we compute the dominant contributions to non-Gaussianities, which depend on both the adiabatic and entropy modes.