Effective field theory for inflation

By S. Weinberg. 2008

955 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The methods of effective field theory are used to study generic theories of inflation with a single inflaton field. For scalar modes, the leading corrections to the R correlation function are found to be purely of the k-inflation type. For tensor modes the leading corrections to the correlation function arise from terms in the action that are quadratic in the curvature, including a parity-violating term that makes the propagation of these modes depend on their helicity. These methods are also briefly applied to nongeneric theories of inflation with an extra shift symmetry, as in so-called ghost inflation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/89a7155e5152c175c32389b1c4d59c1398d1b7c7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Baumann
2. L. Senatore
3. M. Zaldarriaga
4. Xingang Chen
5. E. Pajer
6. D. Green
7. F. Vernizzi
8. K. Koyama

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. D. Baumann
2. Xingang Chen
3. E. Pajer
4. L. Senatore
5. Lavinia Heisenberg
6. K. Koyama
7. F. Vernizzi
8. D. Langlois

Citations in the corpus

• Testing Inflation with Large Scale Structure: Connecting Hopes with Reality (2014, background): “This is the so-called Effective Field Theory of inflation [52]; its action, after some useful rescalings of the field and the coordinates, reads”
• Higgs inflation: consistency and generalisations (2010, background): “Besides, the Lagrangian of the low-energy theory contains standard EFT contributions with higher derivatives of the inflaton field considered in [21, 22].”
• Planck 2015 results. XVII. Constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity (2015, positive): “The effective field theory approach (Cheung et al. 2008; Weinberg 2008) provides an efficient way to constrain inflationary perturbations for various classes of models that incorporate deviations from the standard single-field slow-roll scenario.”
• Cosmological non-linearities as an effective fluid (2010, background): “Our work builds on a long history of studies in non-linear perturbation theory [23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 2], numerical simulations [32, 33, 34, 35], and effective field theory [5, 6, 8, 37].”
• The phase transition to eternal inflation (2008, background): “A useful way of writing down the most generic theory of single field inflation has been recently studied in [25, 26], where modifications with respect to the minimal slow-roll scenario are parametrized in terms of operators for the perturbations around the inflating background.”
• Non-Gaussianity as a particle detector (2016, methodology): “However, for most applications of interest, we can take the so-called decoupling limit, and evaluate the Goldstone action in the unperturbed background [18], gμν → ḡμν .”
• Cosmological tests of modified gravity (2015, background): “Another approach is to build the effective action [243–251] following the effective field theory approach developed for inflationary models [252, 253].”
• The effective field theory of multifield inflation (2010, background): “J H E P 0 4 ( 2 0 1 2 ) 0 2 4 spontaneously broken, a speed of sound equal to one is not protected by any symmetry [1].”
• Models of non-relativistic quantum gravity: the good, the bad and the healthy (2010, methodology): “It serves as the basis of the effective field theory of inflation [29, 30 ].”
• Effective theories of single field inflation when heavy fields matter (2012, background): “The application of effective field theory (EFT) techniques to the study of cosmic inflation, constitutes a powerful and systematic approach through which we can calibrate and account for our ignorance of the laws of physics relevant during the very early universe [1, 2] (see also ref.”
• Conformal consistency relations for single-field inflation (2012, background): “This is indeed what happens for the operator proportional to μ above ((g00 + 1)4 in the language of the effective field theory of inflation [17]).”
• Inflationary paradigm after Planck 2013 (2013, background): “In particular, the predictions do not require knowledge of the prior phases of inflation [8] or of Planckscale physics [38].”
• Symmetries and loops in inflation (2012, methodology): “This approach has been particularly fruitful for describing inflation [10] where the time dependence of the couplings for the Goldstone mode are constrained by additional global symmetries.”