Towards the physical vacuum of cosmic inflation

Abstract

There have been long debates about the initial condition of inflationary perturbations. In this work we explicitly show the decay of excited states during inflation via interactions. For this purpose, we note that the folded shape non-Gaussianity can be interpreted as the decay of the non-Bunch-Davies initial condition. The one loop diagrams with non-Bunch-Davies propagators are calculated to uncover the decay of such excited states. The observed smallness of non-Gaussianity keeps the window open for probing inflationary initial conditions and trans-Planckian physics.

References in corpus (3)

• Just enough inflation: power spectrum modifications at large scales
• Attractor Solutions in Scalar-Field Cosmology
• The Effective Field Theory of Inflation Models with Sharp Features

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Pre-inflation and Trans-Planckian Censorship
• Quantum Cosmic No-Hair Theorem and Inflation
• On the initial condition of inflationary fluctuations
• Differentiating G-inflation from String Gas Cosmology using the Effective Field Theory Approach
• Effect of damped oscillations in the inflationary potential
• An Inflationary Probe of Cosmic Higgs Switching
• Connections between Minkowski and Cosmological Correlation Functions
• Operator Method and Recursion Relations for Inflationary Correlator