arXiv · 2610.07807
Reheating surface volume renormalization and eternal inflation under broken scale invariance
Abstract
Recently, Cotler, Ivo, and Maldacena have shown that under scale invariance, eternal inflation is interpreted as a failure of the reheating surface volume renormalization due to an ill-defined scaling dimension. Meanwhile, observations suggest that scale invariance is slightly broken, which is parametrized by deviation of the spectral index from unity, $\varepsilon=n_s-1$. Motivated by this, we study how the scale invariance breaking effect modifies the no-eternal inflation condition as the renormalizability of the reheating surface volume. For this purpose, we adopt two independent approaches: investigating the behavior of the normal ordered reheating surface volume operator under a shift of the curvature perturbation, and analyzing the coarse-graining structure to obtain the scaling dimension. Both approaches commonly reveal that as long as $\varepsilon$ is negative, which is consistent with observations, the fractal structure of the reheating surface volume breaks down at macroscopic scale, moderating the no-eternal inflation condition.
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Min-Seok Seo. 2026-10-06. Reheating surface volume renormalization and eternal inflation under broken scale invariance. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07807
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