Back-reaction effect in power-law inflation

The presence of cosmological perturbations affects the background metric and matter configuration in which the perturbations propagate. This effect, studied a long time ago for gravitational waves, also is operational for scalar gravitational fluctuations, inhomogeneities which are believed to be more important in inflationary cosmology. The back-reaction of fluctuations can be described by an effective energy-momentum tensor. The issue of coordinate invariance makes the anal...

We consider a more general initial condition satisfying the minimal uncertainty relationship. We calculate the power spectrum of a simple model in inflationary cosmology. The results depend on perturbations generated below a fundamental scale, e.g. the Planck scale.

Inflationary observables, like the power spectrum, computed at one- and higher-order loop level seem to be plagued by large infra-red corrections. In this short note, we point out that these large infra-red corrections appear only in quantities which are not directly observable. This is in agreement with general expectations concerning infra-red effects.

We investigate the one-loop quantum correction to the power spectrum of primordial curvature perturbations in the ultra-slow-roll (USR) inflationary scenario, incorporating the backreaction effect from curvature perturbations. In the spatially-flat gauge, we expand the background inflaton field up to second order and identify the one-loop level backreaction term in the action. Utilizing a gauge transformation, we derive the comoving curvature interaction Hamiltonian in the pr...

We study the class of two-field inflationary Universe models \lambda\phi^4/4 + g^2\chi^2\phi^2/2, in which parametric resonance during the initial stages of reheating can lead to an exponential amplification of the amplitude of cosmological fluctuations. Employing both analytical arguments and numerical simulations, we determine the time at which backreaction of fluctuations on the background fields shuts off the exponential growth, making use of the Hartree approximation, an...

I show that cosmological perturbation spectra produced from quantum fluctuations in massless or self-interacting scalar fields during an inflationary era remain invariant under a two parameter family of transformations of the homogeneous background fields. This relates slow-roll inflation models to solutions which may be far from the usual slow-roll limit. For example, a scale-invariant spectrum of perturbations in a minimally coupled, massless field can be produced by an exp...

We study non-linear contributions to the power spectrum of the curvature perturbation on super-horizon scales, produced during slow-roll inflation driven by a canonical single scalar field. We find that on large scales the linear power spectrum completely dominates and leading non-linear corrections remain totally negligible, indicating that we can safely rely on linear perturbation theory to study inflationary power spectrum. We also briefly comment on the infrared and ultra...

In the framework of Inflationary theory, the assumption that the quantum state of the perturbations is a non-vacuum state leads to a difficulty: non-vacuum initial states imply, in general, a large energy density of inflaton field quanta, not of a cosmological term type, that could prevent the inflationary phase. In this short note, we discuss in detail why this is so, keeping an eye on possible non-Gaussian features due to considering generic non-vacuum initial states.

Recent observations suggest that the spectral index of the primordial perturbations is very close to unity, as expected in models of slow roll inflation. It is still possible for such models to produce spectra which are scale dependent. We present a formula for the spectrum produced by an arbitrary inflaton potential (within the context of slow roll models); this formula explicitly illustrates and accounts for the possiblity of scale dependence. A class of examples are studie...

The back reaction of gravitational perturbations in a homogeneous background is determined by an effective energy-momentum tensor quadratic in the perturbations. We show that this nonlinear feedback effect is important in the case of long wavelength scalar perturbations in inflationary universe models. We also show how to solve an old problem concerning the gauge dependence of the effective energy-momentum tensor of perturbations.