Inflationary Super-Hubble Waves and the Size of the Universe

Abstract

The effect of the scalar spectral index on inflationary super-Hubble waves is to amplify/damp large wavelengths according to whether the spectrum is red ($n_{s}<1$) or blue ($n_{s}>1$). As a consequence, the large-scale temperature correlation function will unavoidably change sign at some angle if our spectrum is red, while it will always be positive if it is blue. We show that this inflationary filtering property also affects our estimates of the size of the homogeneous patch of the universe through the Grishchuk-Zel'dovich effect. Using the recent quadrupole measurement of ESA's Planck mission, we find that the homogeneous patch of universe is at least 87 times bigger than our visible universe if we accept Planck's best fit value $n_{s}=0.9624$. An independent estimation of the size of the universe could be used to independently constrain $n_{s}$, thus narrowing the space of inflationary models.