Exposition to Staggered Multi-Field Inflation

TL;DR

This paper introduces an analytic framework for staggered multi-field inflation models where fields decay during inflation, affecting observable predictions like the scalar spectral index, with relevance to string theory motivated models.

Contribution

It provides a novel analytic approach to compute corrections to inflationary observables in models with decaying multiple fields, especially relevant to string theory scenarios.

Findings

Analytic expressions for corrections to the scalar spectral index.

Framework applicable to string-inspired multi-field inflation models.

Insights into the effects of field decay during inflation.

Abstract

I investigate multi-field inflationary models with fields that decay during inflation, leading to staggered inflation. This feature is natural in many models motivated by string theory, for instance if inflatons are related to interbrane distances and the branes start to annihilate during inflation. A short exposition to an analytic framework is provided, enabling the computation of leading order corrections to observables, i.e. the scalar spectral index.