Abstract
At momenta much higher than the Hubble scale, the cosmological expansion can be thought of as a weak gravitational field. We consider QFT in a particularly convenient set of coordinates that makes this manifest, so that, for those high momenta, the effects of the cosmological expansion can be dealt with using the standard tools of perturbation theory in Minkowski space. In this way, we re-derive standard results of QFT in a cosmological background, such as mode-stretching and gravitational particle production. We discuss the implications of our results for the trans-Planckian problem.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Paolo Creminelli, Lam Hui, Alessandro Podo, and Andrew Tolley for useful discussions. We are especially thankful to Rafael Krichevsky and Federico Piazza for collaboration in the early stages of this project. Our work is partially supported by the U.S. DOE (award number DE-SC011941) and by the Simons Foundation (award number 658906).
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Komissarov, I., Nicolis, A. & Staunton, J. Cosmology as a weak gravitational field and the trans-Planckian problem. J. High Energ. Phys. 2023, 216 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2023)216
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2023)216