Phys. Rev. D 71, 061301 (2005) [5 pages]

Conservation of second-order cosmological perturbations in a scalar field dominated universe

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Filippo Vernizzi
Helsinki Institute of Physics, P.O. Box 64, FIN-00014, University of Helsinki, Finland

Rapid Communication Received 18 November 2004; published 22 March 2005

We discuss second-order cosmological perturbations on super-Hubble scales, in a scalar field dominated universe, such as during single field inflation. In this contest we show that the gauge-invariant curvature perturbations defined on uniform density and comoving hypersurfaces coincide and that perturbations are adiabatic in the large scale limit. Since it has been recently shown that the uniform density curvature perturbation is conserved on large scales if perturbations are adiabatic, we conclude that both the uniform density and comoving curvature perturbations at second order, in a scalar field dominated universe, are conserved. Finally, in the light of this result, we comment on the variables recently used in the literature to compute non-Gaussianities.


©2005 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.71.061301
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.71.061301
PACS: 98.80.Cq

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