Effective field theory and non-Gaussianity from general inflationary states

Abstract

We study the effects of non-trivial initial quantum states for inflationary fluctuations within the context of the effective field theory for inflation constructed by Cheung et al. which allows us to discriminate between different initial states in a model-independent way. We develop a Green's function/path integral based formulation that incorporates initial state effects and use it to address questions such as how state-dependent is the consistency relation for the bispectrum, how many e-folds beyond the minimum required to solve the cosmological fine tunings of the big bang are we allowed so that some information from the initial state survives until late times, among others. We find that the so-called consistency condition relating the local limit of the bispectrum and the slow-roll parameter is a state-dependent statement that can be avoided for physically consistent initial states either with or without initial non-Gaussianities.