Second Order Perturbations During Inflation Beyond Slow-roll
Abstract
We numerically calculate the evolution of second order cosmological perturbations for an inflationary scalar field without resorting to the slow-roll approximation or assuming large scales. In contrast to previous approaches we therefore use the full non-slow-roll source term for the second order Klein-Gordon equation which is valid on all scales. The numerical results are consistent with the ones obtained previously where slow-roll is a good approximation. We investigate the effect of localised features in the scalar field potential which break slow-roll for some portion of the evolution. The numerical package solving the second order Klein-Gordon equation has been released under an open source license and is available for download.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1103.0912,
title = {Second Order Perturbations During Inflation Beyond Slow-roll},
author = {Ian Huston and Karim A. Malik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1103.0912},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
v2: version published in JCAP, references added; v1: 21 pages, 11 figures, numerical package available at http://pyflation.ianhuston.net