Multifield inflation beyond Nfield=2: non-Gaussianities and single-field effective theory

Abstract In this article, we study in detail the linear dynamics and cubic interactions for any number N field of scalar fields during inflation, directly in terms of the observable curvature perturbation ζ and N field -1 entropic fluctuations, a choice that is more suitable for analytical works. In the linear equations of motion for the perturbations, we uncover rich geometrical effects beyond terms involving just the scalar curvature of the field space, and that come from the non-canonical kinetic structure of the scalar fields when the dimension of the field space is larger than two. Moreover, we show that a fast rotation of the local entropic basis can result in negative eigenvalues for the entropic mass matrix, potentially destabilising the background dynamics when N field ⩾ 3. We also explain how to render manifest the sizes of cubic interactions between the adiabatic and the entropic fluctuations, extending a previous work of ours to any number of interacting fields. As a first analytical application of our generic formalism, we derive the effective single-field theory for perturbations up to cubic order when all entropic fluctuations are heavy enough to be integrated out. In a slow-varying limit, we recover the cubic action expected from the effective field theory of inflation, but with a prediction for the usual Wilson coefficients in terms of the multifield parameters, thus proposing a new interpretation of the bispectrum in this generic N field context.