Universal CMB Phase Coherence from Single-Field Inflation

Abstract

The phase coherence of primordial perturbations shapes the acoustic peaks of the CMB and is regarded as a key signature of inflation. Inflationary scenarios at different energy scales, thus with different durations, are commonly expected to leave different levels of coherence. We show this expectation fails: because the curvature perturbation is conserved on super-Hubble scales, the coherence at recombination inherits a value fixed by the observed primordial spectrum alone. This holds irrespective of the inflationary energy scale and the subsequent expansion history.

6 pages without appendices, 3 figures