Revisiting non-Gaussianity in non-attractor inflation models in the light of the cosmological soft theorem

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-attractor inflation models violate the standard consistency relation for non-Gaussianity, deriving a formula that accounts for the correction and emphasizing the role of multiple degrees of freedom during phase transitions.

Contribution

It provides a new formula for the squeezed bispectrum that explicitly includes corrections to the consistency relation in non-attractor inflation models.

Findings

Non-attractor phases lead to violation of the standard consistency relation.

Long-wavelength perturbations during non-attractor phases can affect local physics.

The squeezed bispectrum can be non-zero even when traditional relations predict it should vanish.

Abstract

We revisit the squeezed-limit non-Gaussianity in the single-field non-attractor inflation models from the viewpoint of the cosmological soft theorem. In the single-field attractor models, inflaton's trajectories with different initial conditions effectively converge into a single trajectory in the phase space, and hence there is only one \emph{clock} degree of freedom (DoF) in the scalar part. Its long-wavelength perturbations can be absorbed into the local coordinate renormalization and lead to the so-called \emph{consistency relation} between $n$- and $(n+1)$-point functions. On the other hand, if the inflaton dynamics deviates from the attractor behavior, its long-wavelength perturbations cannot necessarily be absorbed and the consistency relation is expected not to hold any longer. In this work, we derive a formula for the squeezed bispectrum including the explicit correction to the consistency relation, as a proof of its violation in the non-attractor cases. First one must recall that non-attractor inflation needs to be followed by attractor inflation in a realistic case. Then, even if a specific non-attractor phase is effectively governed by a single DoF of phase space (represented by the exact ultra-slow-roll limit) and followed by a single-DoF attractor phase, its transition phase necessarily involves two DoF in dynamics and hence its long-wavelength perturbations cannot be absorbed into the local coordinate renormalization. Thus, it can affect local physics, even taking account of the so-called \emph{local observer effect}, as shown by the fact that the bispectrum in the squeezed limit can go beyond the consistency relation. More concretely, the observed squeezed bispectrum does not vanish in general for long-wavelength perturbations exiting the horizon during a non-attractor phase.