Initial conditions for slow-roll inflation in a random Gaussian landscape

Abstract

In the landscape perspective, our Universe begins with a quantum tunneling from an eternally-inflating parent vacuum, followed by a period of slow-roll inflation. We investigate the tunneling process and calculate the probability distribution for the initial conditions and for the number of e-folds of slow-roll inflation, modeling the landscape by a small-field one-dimensional random Gaussian potential. We find that such a landscape is fully consistent with observations, but the probability for future detection of spatial curvature is rather low, $P \sim 10^{-3}$.