Title

Vacuum Choices and the Predictions of Inflation

Author(s)/Creator(s)

Christian Armendariz-Picon, Syracuse UniversityFollow
Eugene A. Lim, University of Chicago

Document Type

Article

Date

3-11-2003

Language

English

Disciplines

Physics

Description/Abstract

In the presence of a short-distance cutoff, the choice of a vacuum state in an inflating, non-de Sitter universe is unavoidably ambiguous. The ambiguity is related to the time at which initial conditions for the mode functions are specified and to the way the expansion of the universe affects those initial conditions. In this paper we study the imprint of these uncertainties on the predictions of inflation. We parametrize the most general set of possible vacuum initial conditions by two phenomenological variables. We find that the generated power spectrum receives oscillatory corrections whose amplitude is proportional to the Hubble parameter over the cutoff scale. In order to further constrain the phenomenological parameters that characterize the vacuum definition, we study gravitational particle production during different cosmological epochs.

Additional Information

10 two-column pages, 1 figure; uses RevTeX4 More information at http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0303103

Recommended Citation

Armendariz-Picon, Christian and Lim, Eugene A., "Vacuum Choices and the Predictions of Inflation" (2003). Physics - All Scholarship. 220.
https://surface.syr.edu/phy/220

Source

Harvested from Arxiv.org

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.