Exploring a string-like landscape
Jonathan Frazer, Andrew R Liddle

TL;DR
This study investigates inflationary trajectories in a two-dimensional string landscape model, revealing that sufficient inflation is rare but often consistent with current observations, with potential detectability in future experiments.
Contribution
It introduces a numerical analysis of inflation in a string-like landscape using two-field formalism, highlighting the rarity of sufficient inflation and the effects of isocurvature modes.
Findings
Sufficient inflation occurs in about 1 in 100,000 potentials.
Most models with sufficient inflation match current WMAP constraints.
Tensor-to-scalar ratio often detectable by future CMB experiments.
Abstract
We explore inflationary trajectories within randomly-generated two-dimensional potentials, considered as a toy model of the string landscape. Both the background and perturbation equations are solved numerically, the latter using the two-field formalism of Peterson and Tegmark which fully incorporates the effect of isocurvature perturbations. Sufficient inflation is a rare event, occurring for only roughly one in potentials. For models generating sufficient inflation, we find that the majority of runs satisfy current constraints from WMAP. The scalar spectral index is less than 1 in all runs. The tensor-to-scalar ratio is below the current limit, while typically large enough to be detected by next-generation CMB experiments and perhaps also by Planck. In many cases the inflationary consistency equation is broken by the effect of isocurvature modes.
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