English

Primordial trispectrum from inflation

Astrophysics 2008-11-26 v2

Abstract

We use the delta N-formalism to describe the leading order contributions to the primordial power spectrum, bispectrum and trispectrum in multiple-field models of inflation at leading order in a perturbative expansion. In slow-roll models where the initial field fluctuations at Hubble-exit are nearly Gaussian, any detectable non-Gaussianity is expected to come from super-Hubble evolution. We show that the contribution to the primordial trispectrum can be described by two non-linearity parameters, tau_{NL} and g_{NL}, which are dependent upon the second and third derivatives of the local expansion with respect to the field values during inflation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0611075,
  title  = {Primordial trispectrum from inflation},
  author = {Christian T. Byrnes and Misao Sasaki and David Wands},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0611075},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

9 pages, no figures, v2: references added, minor changes, matches version to be published in Phys. Rev. D