Transport equations for the inflationary trispectrum

May, 2012
24 pages
Published in:
  • JCAP 10 (2012) 019
e-Print:

Citations per year

2012201520182021202402468
Abstract: (arXiv)
We use transport techniques to calculate the trispectrum produced in multiple-field inflationary models with canonical kinetic terms. Our method allows the time evolution of the local trispectrum parameters, tauNL and gNL, to be tracked throughout the inflationary phase. We illustrate our approach using examples. We give a simplified method to calculate the superhorizon part of the relation between field fluctuations on spatially flat hypersurfaces and the curvature perturbation on uniform density slices, and obtain its third-order part for the first time. We clarify how the 'backwards' formalism of Yokoyama et al. relates to our analysis and other recent work. We supply explicit formulae which enable each inflationary observable to be computed in any canonical model of interest, using a suitable first-order ODE solver.
Note:
  • 24 pages, plus references and appendix. v2: matches version published in JCAP/ typo fixed in Eq. (54)
  • inflation: multiple field
  • curvature: perturbation
  • correlation function