Enhancement of inflaton loops and de Sitter vacua

While inflaton loops in the Bunch-Davies or Euclidean vacuum generally have a negligible contribution to the power spectrum, loop effects can be substantially larger when the inflaton is in a different vacuum state. As an example, we show that in a truncated alpha-vacuum these loop effects are enhanced by the ratio of the Planck scale to the Hubble scale during inflation. The details of the inflationary models determine whether the coupling constants suppress the loop corrections relative to the tree level result.

hep group

Last modified: Wed Sep 17 21:35:31 EDT 2003