The Evolution of Non-adiabatic Pressure Perturbations during Multi-field Inflation

Abstract

Non-adiabatic pressure perturbations naturally occur in models of inflation consisting of more than one scalar field. The amount of non-adiabatic pressure present at the end of inflation can have observational consequences through changes in the curvature perturbation, the generation of vorticity and subsequently the sourcing of B-mode polarisation. In this work, based on a presentation at the 13th Marcel Grossmann Meeting, we give a very brief overview of non-adiabatic pressure perturbations in multi-field inflationary models and describe our recent calculation of the spectrum of isocurvature perturbations generated at the end of inflation for different models which have two scalar fields.

3 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of 13th Marcel Grossmann Meeting, Stockholm, July 2012. Numerical code available at http://pyflation.ianhuston.net