Sensitivity of inflationary predictions to pre-inflationary phases
- Department of Physics, Cornell University,Ithaca, NY 14853 (United States)
How sensitive are the predictions of inflation to pre-inflationary conditions when the number of efolds of inflation is not too large? In an attempt to address this question, we consider a simple model where the inflationary era is preceded by an era dominated by a radiation fluid, which is coupled to the inflaton only gravitationally and which extends back to the Planck era. We show that there is a natural generalized Bunch-Davies vacuum state for perturbations to the coupled inflaton-gravity-fluid system at early times. With this choice of initial state the model predicts interesting deviations from the standard power spectrum of single field slow-roll inflation at large scales. However, the deviations are too small to be observable in near future CMB observations.
- Sponsoring Organization:
- SCOAP3, CERN, Geneva (Switzerland)
- OSTI ID:
- 22458426
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2016, Issue 01; Other Information: PUBLISHER-ID: JCAP01(2016)027; OAI: oai:repo.scoap3.org:13447; Article funded by SCOAP3. Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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