Testing an Ansatz for the Leading Secular Loop Corrections from Quantum Gravity during Inflation

TL;DR

This paper tests the Transformation Ansatz, which claims leading quantum gravity loop corrections during inflation can be absorbed into coordinate redefinitions, but finds it fails in explicit one-loop calculations.

Contribution

The paper critically evaluates the Transformation Ansatz against explicit one-loop quantum gravity calculations during inflation, revealing its failure.

Findings

The Ansatz does not match explicit one-loop results.

Quantum gravity loop corrections cannot be fully absorbed into coordinate redefinitions.

The results challenge the validity of the Transformation Ansatz during inflation.

Abstract

It is widely believed that the leading secular loop corrections from quantum gravity can be subsumed into a coordinate redefinition. Hence the apparent infrared logarithm corrections to any quantity would be just the result of taking the expectation value of the tree order quantity at the transformed coordinates in the graviton vacuum. We term this the Transformation Ansatz and we compare its predictions against explicit one loop computations in Maxwell + Einstein and Dirac + Einstein on de Sitter background. In each case the ansatz fails.