Inflationary Consistency Conditions from a Wavefunctional Perspective

Abstract

It is shown that the squeezed limit of inflationary expectation values follows from reparametrization invariance of the wavefunction of the universe. This translates into a constraint on the longitudinal modes of functional derivatives of the wavefunction. Thus, the local non-Gaussianity induced by single field inflation is purely a gauge artifact, and should not yield a physically measurable effect. We focus on Einstein gravity in de Sitter space and single field inflation, although the formalism only relies on the diffeomorphism invariance of the theory, and thus applies to any theory of gravity.

24 pages, v2: more references added, v3: published version

References in corpus (4)

• Observational Signatures and Non-Gaussianities of General Single Field Inflation
• On the consistency relation of the 3-point function in single field inflation
• Resonant Trispectrum and a Dozen More Primordial N-point functions
• The Physical Squeezed Limit: Consistency Relations at Order q^2

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