Eternal inflation and energy conditions in de Sitter spacetime

Eternal inflation is shown to require violations of the Null Energy Condition (NEC) on superhorizon scales. With light scalar fields as the matter sources in a de Sitter background, there can be no classical or semiclassical violations of the NEC. However, quantum fluctuations of the energy-momentum tensor, described by an expectation value of four field operators, do lead to large-scale NEC violations. The backreaction of such quantum fluctuations on the inflating spacetime is generally deduced at a heuristic level and leads to the eternal inflation scenario. A rigorous treatment of the backreaction will necessarily include fluctuations of the metric, and several new effects are expected to come into play.