Duality invariance of cosmological perturbation spectra

Abstract

I show that cosmological perturbation spectra produced from quantum fluctuations in massless or self-interacting scalar fields during an inflationary era remain invariant under a two parameter family of transformations of the homogeneous background fields. This relates slow-roll inflation models to solutions which may be far from the usual slow-roll limit. For example, a scale-invariant spectrum of perturbations in a minimally coupled, massless field can be produced by an exponential expansion with $a\propto e^{Ht}$, or by a collapsing universe with $a\propto (-t)^{2/3}$.