Short distance and initial state effects in inflation: stress tensor and decoherence

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework for analyzing how short-distance physics and initial quantum states influence inflationary cosmology, focusing on their effects on the stress tensor, power spectrum, and decoherence, with implications for observable signatures in the CMB.

Contribution

It introduces a consistent effective field theory approach for UV-allowed initial states in inflation and analyzes their impact on observable inflationary signatures and decoherence.

Findings

Finite contributions to the inflationary power spectrum are determined.

UV allowed states do not induce phase decoherence in simple free field models.

The second order adiabatic basis effectively describes particle creation in RW spacetimes.

Abstract

We present a consistent low energy effective field theory framework for parameterizing the effects of novel short distance physics in inflation, and their possible observational signatures in the Cosmic Microwave Background. We consider the class of general homogeneous, isotropic initial states for quantum scalar fields in Robertson-Walker (RW) spacetimes, subject to the requirement that their ultraviolet behavior be consistent with renormalizability of the covariantly conserved stress tensor which couples to gravity. In the functional Schr\"odinger picture such states are coherent, squeezed, mixed states characterized by a Gaussian density matrix. This Gaussian has parameters which approach those of the adiabatic vacuum at large wave number, and evolve in time according to an effective classical Hamiltonian. The one complex parameter family of $\alpha$ squeezed states in de Sitter spacetime does not fall into this UV allowed class, except for the special value of the parameter corresponding to the Bunch-Davies state. We determine the finite contributions to the inflationary power spectrum and stress tensor expectation value of general UV allowed adiabatic states, and obtain quantitative limits on the observability and backreaction effects of some recently proposed models of short distance modifications of the initial state of inflation. For all UV allowed states, the second order adiabatic basis provides a good description of particles created in the expanding RW universe. Due to the absence of particle creation for the massless, minimally coupled scalar field in de Sitter space, there is no phase decoherence in the simplest free field inflationary models. We apply adiabatic regularization to the renormalization of the decoherence functional in cosmology to corroborate this result.