Abstract
We develop a stochastic description of small-field inflationary histories with a graceful exit in a random potential whose Hessian is a Gaussian random matrix as a model of the unstructured part of the string landscape. The dynamical evolution in such a random potential from a small-field inflation region towards a viable late-time de Sitter (dS) minimum maps to the dynamics of Dyson Brownian motion describing the relaxation of non-equilibrium eigenvalue spectra in random matrix theory. We analytically compute the relaxation probability in a saddle point approximation of the partition function of the eigenvalue distribution of the Wigner ensemble describing the mass matrices of the critical points. When applied to small-field inflation in the landscape, this leads to an exponentially strong bias against small-field ranges and an upper bound N ≪ 10 on the number of light fields N participating during inflation from the non-observation of negative spatial curvature.
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Pedro, F.G., Westphal, A. Inflation with a graceful exit in a random landscape. J. High Energ. Phys. 2017, 163 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP03(2017)163
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP03(2017)163