A numerical approach to stochastic inflation and primordial black holes

Abstract

Certain models of cosmic inflation produce strong cosmological perturbations at short length scales, which may later collapse into primordial black holes. To find the statistics of these strong perturbations and the ensuing black holes, it is necessary to go beyond linear perturbation theory. Stochastic inflation provides a way to take the leading non-linear effects into account. In this contribution, I discuss recent progress in numerical computations of stochastic inflation. A numerical approach can include more of the non-linearities than an analytical calculation, and can be applied to single-field inflationary models with any potential.