Related papers: Inflaton Decay in an Alpha Vacuum
We study the decay of scalar fields, in particular the inflaton, into lighter scalars in a De Sitter spacetime background. After providing a practical definition of the rate, we focus on the case of an inflaton interacting with a massless…
We compute the leading order non-Gaussianity, i.e., the bispectrum, of the tensor perturbation in the general $\alpha$-vacuum on de Sitter space in general relativity. In addition to the well-known Bunch-Davies (BD) vacuum, there exits an…
The decay rate of the Bunch-Davies state of a massive scalar field in the expanding flat spatial sections of de Sitter space is determined by an analysis of the particle pair creation process in real time. The Feynman definition of particle…
We apply the Lewis-Riesenfeld invariant method for the harmonic oscillator with time dependent mass and frequency to the modes of a charged scalar field that propagates in a curved, homogeneous and isotropic spacetime. We recover the…
A free scalar field propagating in de Sitter space has a one parameter family of invariant states called the alpha-vacua. In an interacting theory, all except a unique state, the Bunch-Davies vacuum, produce non-renormalizable divergences.…
The vacuum decay in a de Sitter universe is studied within semiclassical approximation for the class of effective inflaton potentials whose curvature at the top is close to a critical value. By comparing the actions of the Hawking - Moss…
We find that the amplitude of quantum fluctuations of the invariant de Sitter vacuum coincides exactly with that of the vacuum of a comoving observer for a massless scalar (inflaton) field. We propose redefining the actual physical power…
We study the quantum correlation and quantum communication channel of both free scalar and fermionic fields in de Sitter space, while the Planckian modification presented by the choice of a particular $\alpha$-vacuum has been considered. We…
The usual (Bunch-Davies) Feynman propagator of a massless field is not well defined in an expanding universe due to the presence of infrared divergences. We propose a new propagator which yields infrared finite answers to any correlation…
In a spacetime with no global timelike Killing vector, we do not have a natural choice for the vacuum state of matter fields, leading to an ambiguity in defining the Feynman propagators. In this paper, taking the vacuum state to be the…
We study the stability of an inflaton condensate in the presence of attractive inflaton self-interactions, in order to determine analytical conditions on the self-interaction couplings under which the condensate undergoes fragmentation. As…
de Sitter space-time has a one complex parameter family of invariant vacua for the theory of a free, massive scalar field. For most of these vacua, in an interacting scalar theory the one loop corrections diverge linearly for large values…
We investigate the modifications to inflationary observables that arise when adopting an $\alpha$-vacuum instead of the standard Bunch--Davies vacuum for quantum fluctuations during inflation. Within the Starobinsky inflationary model, we…
We consider the covariant graviton propagator in de Sitter spacetime in a gauge with two parameters, alpha and beta, in the Euclidean approach. We give an explicit form of the propagator with a particular choice of beta but with arbitrary…
The method of adiabatic invariants for time dependent Hamiltonians is applied to a massive scalar field in a de Sitter space-time. The scalar field ground state, its Fock space and coherent states are constructed and related to the particle…
Field theory in de Sitter space admits a one-parameter family of vacua determined by a superselection parameter alpha. Of these vacua, the Euclidean vacuum uniquely extrapolates to the vacuum of flat Minkowski space. States which resemble…
We consider the entanglement entropy of a free massive scalar field in the one parameter family of $\alpha$-vacua in de Sitter space by using a method developed by Maldacena and Pimentel. An $\alpha$-vacuum can be thought of as a state…
We address the following question: To what extent can a quantum field tell if it has been placed in de Sitter space? Our approach is to use the techniques of non-equilibrium quantum field theory to compute the time evolution of a state…
It is shown that the inflationary era in early universe is realized due to the effect of backreaction of quantized matter fields. In fact we start by quantizing a free scalar field in the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker space-time, and the field…
An interacting scalar field theory in de Sitter space is non-renormalizable for a generic alpha-vacuum state. This pathology arises since the usual propagator used allows for a constructive interference among propagators in loop…