Effective Field Theory Approach to Cosmological Initial Conditions: Self-Consistency Bounds and Non-Gaussianities
arXiv:hep-th/0409210
Abstract
Effective Field Theory (EFT) is an efficient method for parametrizing unknown high energy physics effects on low energy data. When applied to time-dependent backgrounds, EFT must be supplemented with initial conditions. In these proceedings, I briefly describe such approach, especially in the case of inflationary, almost-de Sitter backgrounds. I present certain self-consistency constraints that bound the size of possible deviations of the initial state from the standard thermal vacuum. I also estimate the maximum size of non-Gaussianities due to a non-thermal initial state which is compatible with all bounds. These non-Gaussianities can be much larger than those due to nonlinearities in the action describing single-scalar slow roll inflation
Minor misprints corrected. Contribution to the proceedings of the 13th international seminar on high-energy physics "Quarks 2004," Pushkinskie Gory, Russia, May 24-30, 2004
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Cited by in corpus (11)
- Observational Signatures and Non-Gaussianities of General Single Field Inflation
- Enhanced Non-Gaussianity from Excited Initial States
- Signatures of Initial State Modifications on Bispectrum Statistics
- Warped Reheating in Multi-Throat Brane Inflation
- Decoupling in an expanding universe: backreaction barely constrains short distance effects in the CMB
- On the Initial State and Consistency Relations
- Scale-dependent power spectrum from initial excited-de Sitter modes
- Quantum Cosmic No-Hair Theorem and Inflation
- Extracting New Physics from the CMB
- Naturalness in Cosmological Initial Conditions
- Cosmological Predictions from the Primordial Universe: Non-Gaussianities