The authors define a locality condition for hard-mode states during inflation that unifies local effective dynamics for soft modes, suppression of loop corrections, generalized soft theorems, and absence of infrared divergences in observable correlators.
Inflationary Correlation Functions without Infrared Divergences
1 Pith paper cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Inflationary correlation functions are potentially affected by infrared divergences. For example, the two-point correlator of curvature perturbation at momentum k receives corrections ~ln(kL), where L is the size of the region in which the measurement is performed. We define infrared-safe correlation functions which have no sensitivity to the size L of the box used for the observation. The conventional correlators with their familiar log-enhanced corrections (both from scalar and tensor long-wavelength modes) are easily recovered from our IR-safe correlation functions. Among other examples, we illustrate this by calculating the corrections to the non-Gaussianity parameter f_NL coming from long-wavelength tensor modes. In our approach, the IR corrections automatically emerge in a resummed, all-orders form. For the scalar corrections, the resulting all-orders expression can be evaluated explicitly.
fields
gr-qc 1years
2026 1verdicts
UNVERDICTED 1representative citing papers
citing papers explorer
-
Locality in effective field theory for inflationary soft modes
The authors define a locality condition for hard-mode states during inflation that unifies local effective dynamics for soft modes, suppression of loop corrections, generalized soft theorems, and absence of infrared divergences in observable correlators.