Inflationary perturbation spectrum in extended effective field theory of inflation

Abstract

The effective field theory (EFT) of inflation provides a natural framework to study the new physical effects on primordial perturbations. Recently a healthy extension of the EFT of inflation with high-order operators has been proposed, which avoids ghosts and meanwhile leads to a nonlinear dispersion relation of the scalar perturbations. This paper is devoted to studying the effects of these high-order operators by using the uniform asymptotic approximation method. In particular, we first construct the approximate analytical solution to the mode function of the scalar perturbations. Because of the presence of the high-order operators, the perturbation modes usually experience a period of non-adiabatic evolution before they cross the Hubble radius, which could lead to the production of excited states and modifications of the primordial perturbation spectrum. However, we show that the modified power spectrum is still nearly scale-invariant and the presence of the high-order operators can only affect the overall amplitude of the spectrum. In particular, after showing explicitly the impact of these new effects on particle production rate and perturbation spectrum, we explore their origin in detail.