Conserved cosmological perturbations in USR inflation and bouncing scenarios

Abstract

Inflationary and bouncing scenarios are two frameworks that provide the mechanism to overcome the horizon problem as well as generate the primordial perturbations. In this work, we investigate the conservation of perturbations in single-field models of both inflationary and bouncing scenarios, where the quantity, $z = a \, \rm d \phi/{\rm d}\log a$, with $a$ representing the scale factor and $\phi$ denoting the scalar field, decreases with time. We observe that this behaviour occurs during the ultra-slow-roll phase in the context of inflation and the contracting phase in the context of bounce. We show that the conjugate momentum associated with the comoving curvature perturbation during both the ultra-slow-roll phase and the contracting phase of bouncing scenarios is conserved in the super-Hubble limit. We illustrate that, within the framework of inflation, this conservation of momentum allows for the evolution of perturbations across the ultra-slow-roll phase, enabling the calculation of the power spectrum for modes that exit the Hubble radius before the ultra-slow-roll phase begins. Similarly, in the context of a bounce, we can determine the power spectrum after the bounce using this method. We support our approach with both numerical and analytical arguments.