Slow-Roll Inflation at N3LO

Abstract

The next generation of cosmological observations will be sensitive to small deviations from a pure power law in the primordial power spectrum of the curvature perturbations. In the context of slow-roll inflation, these deviations are expected and correspond to the so-called running of the spectral index. Their measurement would bring as much information as the discovery of deviations from scale invariance. However, robust parameter inference requires to marginalize over any possible higher order uncertainties, which have been, up to now, not fully determined. We tackle this issue by deriving the inflationary scalar and tensor slow-roll power spectra at next-to-next-to-next to leading order (N3LO), fully expanded around an observable pivot wavenumber, for all single field inflationary models having minimal and non-minimal kinetic terms. Our result therefore encompasses string-inspired inflationary models having a varying speed of sound.

23 pages, 2 ancillary python files and 0 figure, uses RevTex. Misprints corrected, matches published version

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• Comment on: "Third-order corrections to the slow-roll expansion: Calculation and constraints with Planck, ACT, SPT, and BICEP/Keck [2025 PDU 47 101813]"
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