Slow-roll inflation at N3LO

Abstract

The next generation of cosmological observations will be sensitive to small deviations from a pure power law in the primordial power spectrum of the curvature perturbations. In the context of slow-roll inflation, these deviations are expected, they correspond to the so-called running of the spectral index. Their measurement would bring as much information as the discovery of deviations from scale invariance. However, robust parameter inference requires to marginalize over any possible higher-order uncertainties which have been, up to now, not fully determined. We tackle this issue by deriving the inflationary scalar and tensor slow-roll power spectra at next-to-next-to-next to leading order, fully expanded around an observable pivot wave number, for all single-field inflationary models having minimal and nonminimal kinetic terms. Our result therefore encompasses string-inspired inflationary models having a varying speed of sound.