The adiabatic/entropy decomposition in $P(\phi^I,X^{IJ})$ theories with multiple sound speeds

TL;DR

This paper investigates how adiabatic and entropy perturbations are defined in multi-field inflation models with different sound speeds, revealing that the natural propagating modes are rotations of these perturbations, affecting the power spectrum calculations.

Contribution

It introduces a new framework for defining adiabatic and entropy modes in multi-speed inflation models, highlighting their non-fundamental nature and impact on power spectrum predictions.

Findings

Adiabatic and entropy modes are not the fundamental propagating degrees of freedom when sound speeds differ.

The fundamental modes are rotations in field space of the traditional adiabatic and entropy perturbations.

Disformal couplings can naturally produce multi-speed kinetic interactions in inflation.

Abstract

We consider $P(\phi^I,X^{IJ})$ theories of multi-field inflation and ask the question of how to define the adiabatic and entropy perturbations, widely used in calculating the curvature and isocurvature power spectra, in this general context. It is found that when the field perturbations propagate with different speeds, these adiabatic and entropy modes are not generally the fundamental (most natural to canonically quantise) degrees of freedom that propagate with a single speed. The alternative fields which do propagate with a single speed are found to be a rotation in field space of the adiabatic and entropy perturbations. We show how this affects the form of the horizon-crossing power spectrum, when there is not a single "adiabatic sound speed" sourcing the curvature perturbation. Special cases of our results are discussed, including $P(X)$ theories where the adiabatic and entropy perturbations are fundamental. We finally look at physical motivations for considering multi-speed models of inflation, particularly showing that disformal couplings can naturally lead to the kind of kinetic interactions which cause fields to have different sound speeds.