Inflaton fluctuations in the presence of cosmological defects

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cosmological defects like black holes, strings, or walls affect quantum fluctuations during inflation, revealing small violations of translational invariance in the scalar two-point correlation functions.

Contribution

It provides a perturbative analysis of scalar fluctuations in the presence of defects, highlighting the impact on correlation functions during inflation.

Findings

Small violation of translational invariance observed

Perturbative expansion in defect parameters used

Explicit two-point correlation functions derived

Abstract

We study quantum fluctuations of a free massless scalar field during inflation in the presence of a point, line, or plane defect such as a black hole, cosmic string, or domain wall, using a perturbative expansion in powers of small defect parameters. We provide results for the scalar two-point correlation functions that show explicitly a small violation of translational invariance during inflation.