The inflationary trispectrum
Abstract
We calculate the trispectrum of the primordial curvature perturbation generated by an epoch of slow-roll inflation in the early universe, and demonstrate that the non-gaussian signature imprinted at horizon crossing is unobservably small, of order tau_NL < r/50, where r < 1 is the tensor-to-scalar ratio. Therefore any primordial non-gaussianity observed in future microwave background experiments is likely to have been synthesized by gravitational effects on superhorizon scales. We discuss the application of Maldacena's consistency condition to the trispectrum.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0610210,
title = {The inflationary trispectrum},
author = {David Seery and James E. Lidsey and Martin S. Sloth},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0610210},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
23 pages, 2 diagrams drawn with feynmp.sty, uses iopart.cls. v2, replaced with version accepted by JCAP. Estimate of maximal tau_NL refined in Section 5, resulting in smaller numerical value. Sign errors in Eq. (44) and Eq. (48) corrected. Some minor notational changes