English

Global adiabaticity and non-Gaussianity consistency condition

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2018-04-27 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

In the context of single-field inflation, the conservation of the curvature perturbation on comoving slices, Rc\R_c, on super-horizon scales is one of the assumptions necessary to derive the consistency condition between the squeezed limit of the bispectrum and the spectrum of the primordial curvature perturbation. However, the conservation of Rc\R_c holds only after the perturbation has reached the adiabatic limit where the constant mode of Rc\R_c dominates over the other (usually decaying) mode. In this case, the non-adiabatic pressure perturbation defined in the thermodynamic sense, δPnadδPcw2δρ\delta P_{nad}\equiv\delta P-c_w^2\delta\rho where cw2=P˙/ρ˙c_w^2=\dot P/\dot\rho, usually becomes also negligible on superhorizon scales. Therefore one might think that the adiabatic limit is the same as thermodynamic adiabaticity. This is in fact not true. In other words, thermodynamic adiabaticity is not a sufficient condition for the conservation of Rc\R_c on super-horizon scales. In this paper, we consider models that satisfy δPnad=0\delta P_{nad}=0 on all scales, which we call global adiabaticity (GA), which is guaranteed if cw2=cs2c_w^2=c_s^2, where csc_s is the phase velocity of the propagation of the perturbation. A known example is the case of ultra-slow-roll(USR) inflation in which cw2=cs2=1c_w^2=c_s^2=1. In order to generalize USR we develop a method to find the Lagrangian of GA K-inflation models from the behavior of background quantities as functions of the scale factor. Applying this method we show that there indeed exists a wide class of GA models with cw2=cs2c_w^2=c_s^2, which allows Rc\R_c to grow on superhorizon scales, and hence violates the non-Gaussianity consistency condition.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1606.04906,
  title  = {Global adiabaticity and non-Gaussianity consistency condition},
  author = {Antonio Enea Romano and Sander Mooij and Misao Sasaki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.04906},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

6 pages, references added, few more changes in the abstract, text and notation

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:26:17.106Z