On Adiabatic Renormalization with a Physically Motivated Infrared Cut-Off

Abstract

We introduce a new approach to renormalize physical quantities in curved space-time by adiabatic subtraction. We use a comoving infrared cut-off in defining the adiabatic counterpart of the physical quantity under consideration, building on the fact that the adiabatic approximation is ill-defined in the infrared tail of the spectrum. We show how this infrared cut-off should be used to obtain a completely well-defined renormalization scheme and how it is fundamental to avoid unphysical divergences that can be generated by a pathological behavior of the adiabatic subtraction extended to the infrared tail. The infrared cut-off appears as a new degree of freedom introduced in the theory and its actual value has to be consistently fixed by a physical prescription. As an example, we show how such degree of freedom can be set to obtain the correct value of the conformal anomaly in the symptomatic case of an inflationary model with gauge fields coupled to a pseudo-scalar inflaton.

arXiv comment16 pages, 1 figure. Few comments and clarifications added, version accepted for publication in JCAP

References in corpus (25)

• Encyclopaedia Inflationaris
• Twenty Years of the Weyl Anomaly
• Gauge Fields and Inflation
• Primordial magnetic fields from pseudo-Goldstone bosons
• Naturally inflating on steep potentials through electromagnetic dissipation
• Phenomenology of a Pseudo-Scalar Inflaton: Naturally Large Nongaussianity
• Quantum fields in curved spacetime
• Gauge-preheating and the end of axion inflation
• Magnetogenesis from axion inflation
• Gauge Field and Fermion Production during Axion Inflation
• QFT on curved spacetimes: axiomatic framework and examples
• Backreaction of electromagnetic fields and the Schwinger effect in pseudoscalar inflation magnetogenesis
• Revising the predictions of inflation for the cosmic microwave background anisotropies
• Schwinger Effect by an $SU(2)$ Gauge Field during Inflation
• On Adiabatic Renormalization of Inflationary Perturbations
• On infrared and ultraviolet divergences of cosmological perturbations
• The Power Spectrum in de Sitter Inflation, Revisited
• Adiabatic Regularization for Gauge Field and the Conformal Anomaly
• Preheating and Entropy Perturbations in Axion Monodromy Inflation
• Quantum Field Theory on Curved Backgrounds
• The Impact of Ultraviolet Regularization on the Spectrum of Curvature Perturbations During Inflation
• Energy-momentum tensor and helicity for gauge fields coupled to a pseudo-scalar inflaton
• On the power spectrum generated during inflation
• Renormalization in gravitational leptogenesis with pseudo-scalar-tensor coupling
• Gauge Field Production and Schwinger Reheating in Runaway Axion Inflation

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Renormalizing the vacuum energy in cosmological spacetime: implications for the cosmological constant problem
• Instability in axion inflation with strong backreaction from gauge modes
• Lattice simulations of Abelian gauge fields coupled to axions during Inflation
• On the adiabatic subtraction of cosmological perturbations