New paper and Pyflation software package

My latest paper has just hit the arXiv and is now available. The paper builds on the numerical work I previously completed on cosmological perturbations beyond linear order. The new results do not assume slow-roll in the calculation of the source term for the second order equations of motion and so allow a much greater range of potentials to be analysed. The paper is called “Second Order Perturbations During Inflation Beyond Slow-roll” and already has a record on SPIRES and Inspire Beta.

Accompanying the paper is the release of the software package used to create the results. Pyflation is a Python package which calculates the first and second order perturbation results including the source term required at each time step. It requires Numpy, Scipy and PyTables and a fairly recent version of Python. The full calculation for a large range of Fourier wavemodes takes a long time on a single CPU, but there is support for splitting the calculation into many separate jobs which can be queued on a multi-core or cluster based setup. Alternatively there is also support for calculating the second order results for a single wavemode, which significantly reduces the execution time.

The Pyflation website contains all the details and download links, installation notes and links to the relevant papers. We’ve released the package under a very liberal open source license (modified BSD license) but as citations are increasingly the oil that greases the wheels of academia we ask that anyone who uses results they have obtained with Pyflation to please cite one or more of the related papers.