The Open Effective Field Theory of Inflation
arxiv(2024)
摘要
In our quest to understand the generation of cosmological perturbations, we
face two serious obstacles: we do not have direct information about the
environment experienced by primordial perturbations during inflation, and our
observables are practically limited to correlators of massless fields, heavier
fields and derivatives decaying exponentially in the number of e-foldings. The
flexible and general framework of open systems has been developed precisely to
face similar challenges. Building on previous work, we develop a
Schwinger-Keldysh path integral description for an open effective field theory
of inflation, describing the possibly dissipative and non-unitary evolution of
the Goldstone boson of time translations interacting with an unspecified
environment, under the key assumption of locality in space and time. Working in
the decoupling limit, we study the linear and interacting theory in de Sitter
and derive predictions for the power spectrum and bispectrum that depend on a
finite number of effective couplings organised in a derivative expansion. The
smoking gun of interactions with the environment is an enhanced but finite
bispectrum close to the folded kinematical limit. We demonstrate the generality
of our approach by matching our open effective theory to an explicit model. Our
construction provides a standard model to simultaneously study phenomenological
predictions as well as quantum information aspects of the inflationary
dynamics.
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