Can all the infrared secular growth really be understood as increase of classical statistical variance?

Abstract

It is known that in the theory of light scalar fields during inflation, correlation functions suffer from infrared (IR) divergences or large IR loop corrections, leading to the breakdown of perturbation theory. In order to understand the physical meaning of such IR enhancement, we investigate the stochastic properties of an effective equation of motion (EoM) for long-wavelength modes of a canonically normalized light scalar field $\varphi$ with a general sufficiently flat interaction potential on de Sitter background. Firstly, we provide an alternative refined derivation of the effective action for long-wavelength modes which leads to the effective EoM that correctly reproduces all the IR correlation functions in a good approximation at a late time, by integrating out short-wavelength modes. Next, under the assumption that one can neglect non-local correlations in the influence functional exceeding the coarse-graining scale, we show that the effective EoM for IR modes of the "average field" in Schwinger-Keldysh formalism ${\varphi }_c^{<}$ can be interpreted as a classical stochastic process in the present model.

22 pages, 2 figures. v2: matches published version

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