Speaker
Description
If the inflaton gets trapped in a local minimum of its potential shortly before the end of inflation, it escapes by building up quantum fluctuations in a process known as stochastic tunnelling. In this work we study cosmological fluctuations produced in such a scenario, and how likely they are to form Primordial Black Holes (PBHs). This is done by using the stochastic-$δN$ formalism, which allows us to reconstruct the highly non-Gaussian tails of the distribution function of the number of $e$-folds spent in the false-vacuum state. We explore two different toy models, both analytically and numerically, in order to identify which properties do or do not depend on the details of the false-vacuum profile. We find that when the potential barrier is small enough compared to its width, $ΔV/V<Δϕ^2/M_{Pl}^2$, the potential can be approximated as being flat between its two local extrema, so results previously obtained in a "flat quantum well'' apply. Otherwise, when $ΔV/V
Faculty position
Postdoc
| Topic Field | Cosmology |
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