Elastic boundaries in Stochastic Inflation

Abstract

In the context of stochastic inflation, specifying boundary conditions is often a requirement to distinguish domains where quantum diffusion takes place from regions where stochastic effects are suppressed compared to the standard slow-roll evolution. Yet, even though the transition between the two is expected to be smooth and continuous, most of the literature has hitherto focused on absorbing and reflective boundaries. We consider here the use of a broader class of boundaries, called elastic, which involves one free parameter interpolating between these two limiting cases. We show how the conventional stochastic-$δN$, and its recently proposed time-reversed counterpart adapt to such a class of boundary behaviour. As an illustration, we solve time-reversed stochastic inflation for an exactly flat semi-infinite potential with an elastic boundary, a setup where the standard stochastic-$δN$ formalism breaks down, and compare the results to the purely absorbing case. Quantitative differences are found in terms of skewness and tail behaviour. This suggests that the transition between stochastic inflation and subsequent evolution may have observable consequences. Finally, we show that an elastic boundary stands as an effective model for stochastic tunnelling through a Dirac delta potential barrier. This mechanism can be equivalently framed as a smooth transition of stochastic trajectories in a mirror virtual medium with specific absorption properties.