On Corpuscular Theory of Inflation

Understand

In order to go beyond the mean-field approximation, commonly used in the inflationary computations, an identification of the quantum constituents of the inflationary background is made.

• In particular, the homogeneous scalar field configuration is represented as a Bose-Einstein condensate of the off-shell inflaton degrees of freedom, with mass significantly screened by the gravitational binding energy.
• The gravitational counterpart of the classical background is considered to be a degenerate state of the off-shell longitudinal gravitons with the frequency of the order of the Hubble scale.
• As a result, the origin of the density perturbations in the slow-roll regime is identified as an uncertainty in the position of the constituent inflatons.