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Summary: CALT-68-1427
DOE RESEARCH AND
DEVELOPMENT REPORT
Non-Gaussian Density Perturbations in Inflationary Cosmologies
T. J. Allen, B. Grinstein and Mark B. Wise
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125
Abstract
The primordial mass density fluctuations may have arisen from quantum fluctuations in a
(massless) scalar field that occurred during an inflationary era. We show that it is possible for
primordial mass density fluctuations, which arose in this way, to be highly non-Gaussian. We
also show that the "bad" infrared properties of the propagator for a massless scalar field in de
Sitter space can translate itself into a power spectrum, for the the two-point spatial correlation
of objects that do not trace the mass, which behaves like k-3, at small wave numbers k.
Work supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy under Contracts DEAC-03-81-ER40050 and
DE-FG03-84-ER40172.
Sloan Fellow.
Limits on the anisotropy of the microwave background radiation restrict the primordial fluc-
tuations in the mass density to be small at early times. However, the fluctuations do grow in the
matter-dominated era because of gravitational instability. Presumably the primordial fluctua-
tions in the mass density determined the large-scale structure of the universe that is observed
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