Corpuscular Consideration of Eternal Inflation

TL;DR

This paper examines eternal inflation through a corpuscular perspective, demonstrating that quantum depletion effects prevent the onset of eternal inflation in certain models, challenging previous assumptions.

Contribution

It introduces a corpuscular framework to analyze eternal inflation, showing quantum depletion can dominate fluctuations and exclude eternal inflation in monomial potentials.

Findings

Quantum depletion can dominate over field fluctuations.

Eternal inflation is excluded in monomial potentials.

The corpuscular approach offers new insights into space-time dynamics.

Abstract

We review the paradigm of eternal inflation in the light of the recently proposed corpuscular picture of space-time. Comparing the strength of the average fluctuation of the field up its potential with that of quantum depletion, we show that the latter can be dominant. We then study the full respective distributions in order to show that the fraction of the space-time which has an increasing potential is always below the eternal-inflation threshold. We prove that for monomial potentials eternal inflaton is excluded. This is likely to hold for other models as well.