Study of the Spectrum of Inflaton Perturbations

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the spectrum of inflaton perturbations during inflation, demonstrating how scale-invariance arises, examining the resulting metric and density perturbations, and exploring the effects of renormalization and initial fluctuations on observable cosmological features.

Contribution

It introduces a renormalization approach that avoids divergences and shows the spectrum's behavior for small inflaton masses, providing new insights into inflationary perturbations and their observational implications.

Findings

Scale-invariance of perturbation spectrum is derived.

Density perturbation spectrum approaches a mass-independent limit for small inflaton masses.

Pre-inflation fluctuations can persist and influence current observations.

Abstract

We examine the spectrum of inflaton fluctuations resulting from any given long period of exponential inflation. Infrared and ultraviolet divergences in the inflaton dispersion summed over all modes do not appear in our approach. We show how the scale-invariance of the perturbation spectrum arises. We also examine the spectrum of scalar perturbations of the metric that are created by the inflaton fluctuations that have left the Hubble sphere during inflation and the spectrum of density perturbations that they produce at reentry after inflation has ended. When the inflaton dispersion spectrum is renormalized during the expansion, we show (for the case of the quadratic inflaton potential) that the density perturbation spectrum approaches a mass-independent limit as the inflaton mass approaches zero, and remains near that limiting value for masses less than about 1/4 of the inflationary Hubble constant. We show that this limiting behavior does not occur if one only makes the Minkowski space subtraction, without the further adiabatic subtractions that involve time derivatives of the expansion scale factor $a(t)$. We also find a parametrized expression for the energy density produced by the change in $a(t)$ as inflation ends. If the end of inflation were sufficiently abrupt, then the temperature corresponding to this energy density could be very significant. We also show that fluctuations of the inflaton field that are present before inflation starts are not dissipated during inflation, and could have a significant observational effect today. The mechanism for this is caused by the initial fluctuations through stimulated emission from the vacuum.