Out of Equilibrium Fields in Inflationary Dynamics. Density Fluctuations

Abstract

The energy and time scales during the inflationary stage of the universe calls for an out of equilibrium quantum field treatment. Moreover, the high energy densities involved make necessary the use of non-perturbative approaches as large N and Hartree methods. We start these lectures by introducing such non-perturbative out of equilibrium methods in cosmological universes. We discuss the renormalization procedure and the choice of initial conditions. We then study the nonlinear dynamics of quantum fields in matter and radiation dominated FRW and de Sitter universes. For a variety of initial conditions, we compute the evolution of the inflaton,its quantum fluctuations and the equation of state. We investigate the explosive particle production due to spinodal unstabilities and parametric amplification in FRW and de Sitter universes with and without symmetry breaking.We find that the particle production is sensitive to the expansion of the universe.For symmetry breaking scenarios, we determine generic late time fields behavior for FRW and deSitter cosmologies.We find that quantum fluctuations damp in FRW as the square of the scale factor while the order parameter approaches a minimum of the potential at the same rate.We con- sider an O(N) inflaton model coupled self-consistently to gravity in the semi- classical approximation for a `new inflation' scenario. We find that spinodal instabilities drive the growth of non-perturbatively large quantum fluctuations which shut off inflation. These fluctuations assemble with the inflaton zero mode yielding a new effective field that actually rolls down behaving classi- cally. We compute the amplitude and index for scalar density and tensor perturbations. In all models of this type the spinodal instabilities produce a `red' spectrum of primordial scalar density perturbations.