Enhanced inflationary trispectrum from a non-vacuum initial state

I. Agullo, University of Cambridge
J. Navarro-Salas, Universitat de València
L. Parker, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Abstract

We work out the primordial inflationary trispectrum for curvature perturbations in models with standard kinetic terms, when the initial quantum state is not necessarily the Bunch-Davies vacuum state. The presence of initial perturbations enhances the trispectrum amplitude for squeezed configurations, in parallel to the bispectrum enhancement. For those squeezed configurations the trispectrum acquires the so-called local form, with a scale dependent amplitude that can get values larger than the prediction of the so-called Maldacena consistency relation. The enhancement factor could be as large as 106, and could reach the sensitivity of forthcoming observations, even for single-field inflationary models.