Theory

Sander Mooij "Generalizing Maldacena's consistency relation"

Europe/Amsterdam
H331 (Nikhef)

H331

Nikhef

Description
The beauty and power of Maldacena's consistency relation relates three cosmological observables: the size and scale dependence of the inflationary two-point function, and the size of the (squeezed limit of) the inflationary three-point function. In this talk I want to review this consistency relation and then discuss two possible generalizations. At the one hand, we generalize to non-attractor inflation models (models dependent on initial conditions). At the other hand, we generalize from the viewpoint of an "idealized" comoving observers to that of a "realistic" free-falling observer. For attractor models, this last generalization was already done in 1305.0824 and related work, here we look at the free-falling observer generalization for non-attractor models. We conclude that, just like in the attractor case, long-wavelength perturbations perturb both the geodesic of a comoving observer and the signal that she wants to measure. As a result, the primordial squeezed three-point function cannot be observed by a free-falling observer.