Revealing the Structure of the Inflationary Landscape through Primordial non-Gaussianity

Understand

In this thesis, we show how the structure of the landscape potential of the primordial Universe may be probed through the primordial density perturbations responsible for the origin of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies and the large-scale structure of our Universe.

• Isocurvature fields may have fluctuated across the barriers separating local minima of the landscape potential during inflation.
• We analyze how this process could have impacted the evolution of the primordial curvature perturbations.
• If the typical distance separating consecutive minima of the landscape potential and the height of the potential barriers are smaller than the Hubble expansion rate parametrizing inflation, the probability distribution function of isocurvature fields becomes non-Gaussian due to the appearance of bumps and dips associated with the structure of the potential.