Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Cosmological Inflation In N-Dimensional Gaussian Random Fields With Algorithmic Data Compression, Connor A. Painter

Honors Theses

The leading modern theories of cosmological inflation are increasingly multi-dimensional. The “inflaton field” φ that has been postulated to drive accelerating expansion in the very early universe has a corresponding potential function V , the details of which, such as the number of dimensions and shape, have yet to be specified. We consider a natural hypothesis that V ought to be maximally random. We realize this idea by defining the V as a Gaussian random field in some number N of dimensions. We repeatedly simulate of the evolution of φ given a set of conditions on the “landscape” of V …