Causality Implies Inflationary Back-Reaction

Abstract

There is a widespread belief among inflationary cosmologists that a local observer cannot sense super-horizon gravitons. The argument goes that a local observer would subsume super-horizon gravitons into a redefinition of his coordinate system. We show that adopting this view for pure gravity on de Sitter background leads to time variation in the Hubble parameter measured by a local observer. It also leads to a violation of the gravitational field equation $R=4\Lambda$ because that equation is obeyed by the full metric, rather than the one which has been cleansed of super-horizon modes.

20 pages, 2 figures, uses LaTeX2e, version 2 slightly revised for publication

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Patient Observers and Non-perturbative Infrared Dynamics in Inflation
• One-loop Graviton Corrections to Conformal Scalars on a de Sitter Background