Stochastic inflation beyond slow roll: noise modelling and importance sampling (2410.13683v2)

Abstract: We simulate the distribution of very rare, large excursions in the primordial density field produced in models of inflation in the very early universe which include a strong enhancement of the power spectrum. The stochastic $\delta \mathcal{N}$ formalism is used to identify the probability distribution for the primordial curvature perturbation with the first-passage-time distribution, $P(\delta \mathcal{N})$, and we compare our stochastic results with those obtained in the classical $\delta \mathcal{N}$ approach. We extend the PyFPT numerical code to simulate the full 2D phase space, and apply importance sampling which allows very rare fluctuations to be simulated in $\mathcal{O}(10)$ minutes on a single CPU, where previous direct simulations required supercomputers. We demonstrate that the stochastic noise due to quantum fluctuations after a sudden transition to ultra-slow roll can be accurately modelled using an analytical Bessel-function ansatz to identify the homogeneous growing mode. The stochastic noise found in this way is a function of the field value only. This enables us to coarse grain the inflation field at the Hubble scale and include non-linear, stochastic evolution on all super-Hubble length scales.