arXiv 1906.035892019-06-09astro-ph.CO

检验暴胀宇宙学

Testing Inflationary Cosmology

Robert J. Hardwick

备注：: 252 pages, 56 figures, 11 tables, thorough review of stochastic spectator fields in chapter 4 (with new results in the case of non-minimal coupling). PhD thesis, University of Portsmouth (2019)

摘要：

在这篇论文中，我们将主要展示如何额外的标量自由度-这是从许多高能量嵌入的动机-打开新的观测窗口到通货膨胀的物理。我们构建了一个贝叶斯框架，在统计上比较模型与当前天文数据的其他领域。把通货膨胀的测试，我们进行我们的分析二次曲率伴随着一系列的通货膨胀的潜力，我们发现，只有一个潜在的仍然是一个可行的候选人。此外，如果曲率机制被未来的非高斯测量（来自大尺度结构测量）所证实，该模型可以被证明是早期暴胀历史的巨大信息。当考虑这些标量场的基本量子行为时，它们的初始条件就变得明显了。考虑到这种物理学，我们可以发展出暴胀后现象学的详细模型（即曲率模型和冻结暗物质模型），并发现暴胀本身的强有力的新探测器。我们进一步展示了如何激励先验信息在我们的贝叶斯分析，这一理论研究补充了我们的统计方法。文章最后讨论了通货膨胀模型选择的未来前景。通过假设不同的玩具调查配置，我们预测不同的结果，使用信息理论和我们新开发的贝叶斯实验设计形式主义。特别是，我们发现，最有可能观察到的优化单场暴胀模型之间的模型选择，通过一个数量级的精度提高，在未来，是标量谱指数。最后，我们总结了整个过程中获得的结果。

英文摘要：

In this thesis we will primarily demonstrate how additional scalar degrees of freedom - which are motivated from many high-energy embeddings - open up new observational windows onto the physics of inflation. We construct a Bayesian framework to statistically compare models with additional fields given the current astronomical data. Putting inflation to the test, we perform our analysis on the quadratic curvaton accompanying a range of inflationary potentials, where we find that only one potential remains as a viable candidate. Furthermore, if the curvaton mechanism were to be confirmed by future non-Gaussianity measurements (from large scale structure surveys), the model could prove to be tremendously informative of the early inflationary history. The initial conditions given to these scalar fields become apparent when considering their fundamentally quantum behaviour. Taking this physics into account leads us to develop detailed models for post-inflationary phenomenology (namely, the curvaton and freeze-in dark matter models) and to discover powerful new probes of inflation itself. We further demonstrate how this theoretical study complements our statistical approach by motivating the prior information in our Bayesian analyses. The thesis finishes with a discussion of the future prospects for inflationary model selection. By hypothesising different toy survey configurations, we forecast different outcomes using information theory and our newly developed Bayesian experimental design formalism. In particular, we find that the most likely observable to optimise model selection between single-field inflationary models, through an order of magnitude precision improvement in the future, is the scalar spectral index. We conclude with a summary of the results obtained throughout.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。

摘要：

英文摘要：

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