Study of Nonlinear Evolution of Spacetime Fluctuations in Quantum Gravity Inflation for Deriving Primordial Spectrum

Abstract

We study the evolution of quantum fluctuations of gravity around an inflationary solution in renormalizable quantum gravity, in which the initial scalar-fluctuation dominance is shown by the background-free nature expressed by a special conformal invariance. Inflation ignites at the Planck scale and continues until spacetime phase transition occurs at a dynamical scale of about 1017 GeV. We show that during inflation, the initially large scale-invariant fluctuations reduce in amplitude to the appropriate magnitude suggested by tiny CMB anisotropies. The goal of this research is to derive the spectra of scalar fluctuations at the phase transition point, that is, the primordial spectra. A system of nonlinear evolution equations for the fluctuations is derived from the quantum gravity effective action. The running coupling constant is then expressed by a time-dependent average following the spirit of the mean field approximation. In this paper, we determine and examine various nonlinear terms, not treated in previous studies such as the exponential factor of the conformal mode. These contributions occur during the early stage of inflation when the amplitude is still large. Moreover, in order to verify their effects concretely, we numerically solve the evolution equation by making a simplification to extract the most contributing parts of the terms in comoving momentum space. The result indicates that they serve to maintain the initial scale invariance over a wide range beyond the comoving Planck scale. This is a challenge toward the derivation of the precise primordial spectra, and we expect in the future that it will lead to the resolution of the tensions that have arisen in cosmology.