Numerical evaluation of inflationary 3-point functions on curved field space—with the transport method & CppTransport

Sean Butchers, David Seery
2018 Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics  
We extend the public CppTransport code to calculate the statistical properties of fluctuations in multiple-field inflationary models with curved field space. Our implementation accounts for all physical effects at tree-level in the 'in-in' diagrammatic expansion. This includes particle production due to time-varying masses, but excludes scenarios where the curvature perturbation is generated by averaging over the decay of more than one particle. We test our implementation by comparing results
more » ... Cartesian and polar field-space coordinates, showing excellent numerical agreement and only minor degradation in compute time. We compare our results with the PyTransport 2.0 code, which uses the same computational approach but a different numerical implementation, finding good agreement. Finally, we use our tools to study a class of gelaton-like models which could produce an enhanced non-Gaussian signal on equilateral configurations of the Fourier bispectrum. We show this is difficult to achieve using hyperbolic field-space manifolds and simple inflationary potentials.
doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2018/07/031 fatcat:ihxf3r3jazheniagubyy3iz4iq