Open Effective Field Theories for cosmology

TL;DR

Open effective field theories extend traditional models by incorporating dissipative and noisy effects, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of non-Hamiltonian evolution in cosmological inhomogeneities and their observable imprints.

Contribution

This work introduces a framework that generalizes the effective field theory of inflation to include dissipation and noise, capturing non-Hamiltonian dynamics in cosmology.

Findings

Recover standard EFT of inflation in a limit

Account for local dissipation and noises

Generate non-Gaussianities peaking in specific configurations

Abstract

When energy is not conserved, imprints of new physics on observable cosmology might not follow the rules of local effective actions. By capturing dissipative and diffusive effects, open effective field theories account for the possibly non-Hamiltonian evolution of cosmological inhomogeneities interacting with an unspecified environment. In this proceeding, we briefly discuss recent progress made towards their implementation in primordial cosmology. Our approach recovers the usual effective field theory of inflation in a certain limit and extends it to account for local dissipation and noises. Non-Gaussianities are generated that peak in the equilateral configuration for large dissipation and in the folded configurations for small dissipation. The construction provides an embedding for local dissipative models of inflation and a framework to study quantum information aspects of the inflationary models.