Higher derivatives and power spectrum in effective single field inflation

Abstract

We study next-to-leading corrections to the effective action of the curvature perturbation obtained by integrating out the coupled heavy isocurvature perturbation. These corrections result from including higher order derivative operators, weighted by the mass scale of the heavy physics, in the effective theory expansion. We find that the correction terms are suppressed by the ratio of the Hubble parameter to the heavy mass scale. The corresponding corrections to the power spectrum of the curvature perturbation are presented for a simple illustrative example.