Inflation is the ultra-fast expansion of the universe in its first moments. It was driven by a field resembling a ball rolling down a hill. But there could have been a second, almost imperceptible ball nearby. The authors of this work considered exactly that scenario: a light spectator field (the axion), frozen at the top of its potential.
During inflation, the axion stayed put and had no effect. But as soon as the main field finished its job, the axion began to move. It's like an orchestra: the main melody has faded, and suddenly a quiet instrument joins in, changing the impression of the entire piece. In cosmology, such a 'late entry' is called a tachyonic anchor. It occurs on enormous scales, exceeding the size of the visible universe.
As a result, two key numbers change: the ratio of gravitational waves to inhomogeneities (r) and the tilt of the spectrum of these inhomogeneities ($n_s$). Models that previously didn't fit the Planck satellite data may now turn out to be correct. It's as if an old bread recipe suddenly started producing perfect loaves, just by adding a pinch of baking soda at the right moment.
Interestingly, the mechanism predicts local non-Gaussianity with an amplitude of order unity. In simple terms, the distribution of hot and cold spots on the cosmic microwave background map should deviate slightly from normal. This can be tested in the coming years.
Inflation lasted about $10^{-32}$ seconds, but during that time the universe expanded by a factor of $10^{26}$—as if a grain of sand became the size of the Milky Way.
In Carl Sagan's novel 'Contact', aliens use wormholes to bypass the speed of light limit; here, the axion acts as a hidden tunnel in parameter space, connecting seemingly incompatible theories.