Cosmological perturbations in multiple-field inflation

Abstract

We analyze cosmological perturbations to the linear order in the context of inflation with an arbitrary number of scalar fields. The fields take values on a non-trivial manifold with a positive-definite metric and are non-minimally coupled to Einstein gravity. The perturbations are decomposed into three different types. The scalar-type perturbations are presented in a gauge-ready form without fixing the temporal gauge condition, as well as in terms of gauge-invariant variables. The gauge-ready method enables us to impose different gauge conditions which are most suitable to the problem at hand. We quantize the scalar perturbations and obtain the solutions.