The current models of inflation work not simply by assuming that the universe did undergo a phase of exponential inflation, but they moreover introduce a new field – the “inflaton” – that supposedly caused this rapid expansion. For this to work, it is not sufficient to just postulate the existence of this field, the field also must have a suitable potential. This potential is basically a function (of the field) and typically requires several parameters to be specified.
Most of the papers published on inflation are then exercises in relating this inflaton potential to today’s cosmological observables, such as the properties of the cosmic microwave background.
Now, in the past week two long papers about all those inflationary models appeared on the arXiv:
Cosmic Inflation: Trick or Treat?
By Jerome Martin
arXiv:1902.05286 [astro-ph.CO]and
Inflation after Planck: Judgement Day
By Debika Chowdhury, Jerome Martin, Christophe Ringeval, Vincent Vennin
arXiv:1902.03951 [astro-ph.CO]The first paper, by Jerome Martin alone, is a general overview of the idea of inflation. It is well-written and a good introduction, but if you are familiar with the topic, nothing new to see here.
The second paper is more technical. It is a thorough re-analysis of the issue of finetuning in inflationary models and a response to the earlier papers by Ijjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb. The main claim of the new paper is that the argument by Ijjas et al , that inflation is “in trouble,” is wrong because it confuses two different types of models, the “plateau models” and the “hilltop models” (referring to different types of the inflaton potential).
According to the new analysis, the models most favored by the data are the plateau models, which do not suffer from finetuning problems, whereas the hilltop models do (in general) suffer from finetuning but are not favored by the data anyway. Hence, they conclude, inflation is doing just fine.
What do the @physicists think?
I agree with Sabine, the fine-tuning problem is not well-posed. From her blog post:
Finetuning arguments will forever remain ambiguous because they eventually depend on unjustifiable assumptions. What’s the probability for getting any particular inflaton potential to begin with? Well, if you use the most common measure on the space of all possible function, then all so-far considered potentials have probability zero. This type of reasoning just does not lead anywhere. So why waste time talking about finetuning?
This reminds me of the other conversations we’ve had here about the danger of naively multiplying assumed probabilities together and using it to disprove evolution, the origin of life or the Resurrection (e.g. Falter: Every Birth is a Statistical Impossibility). It could be applied here to fine-tuning in the same way.