For an attractor with one adiabatic clock and a regular Bunch-Davies vacuum, a long comoving curvature perturbation acts at leading order as a spatial dilation. The single-field inflation squeezed-limit consistency relation therefore fixes
For the local convention , comparison with its squeezed primordial bispectrum gives
The matter-era negative gravitational potential is , so this is also the conventional of part (i). In single-field slow-roll inflation, the spectral tilt is small and the effective local coupling is of slow-roll size, typically of order for a tilt of a few percent. This is a statement about the normalized coupling: the squeezed primordial bispectrum still contains the large long-mode power spectrum.
Formally putting this small coupling into the local template of part (ii) predicts only a tiny correction on accessible scales, rather than an order-unity local signal. For a physical halo abundance there is a stronger qualification. The consistency-relation modulation at fixed coordinate wavelength is a dilation; the coordinate size of a fixed physical halo must be dilated too. Those responses cancel. This is the absence of primordial scale-dependent halo bias in single-clock inflation: the leading consistency-relation term produces no physical halo bias. The first physical long-mode response contains two spatial derivatives, so dividing it by does not produce the local-template enhancement. Thus the leading primordial large-scale galaxy power spectrum remains the Gaussian-bias result, apart from ordinary transfer, bias, and projection effects.
The cancellation can be seen with a top-hat filter. At fixed local time, a constant long curvature rescales physical lengths by , so the coordinate radius of a fixed physical halo is , and the coordinate short density contrast is . Changing variables gives
Thus the smoothed field and its variance at fixed physical mass are unchanged by the constant long mode.
The assumptions matter: a non-attractor such as ultra-slow-roll inflation, additional fluctuating fields, or an excited initial state need not obey this squeezed-limit conclusion. A sizable physical local modulation would test the stated single-clock attractor assumptions, rather than every possible one-field model.
For the Fourier transform convention of equation 3, insert the given power spectrum as . With ,
The Fourier transform of a Gaussian, or the order-zero Hankel transform, also gives
Thus the coherent attenuation in a white-noise random medium is
For a unit incident plane wave, the Fresnel propagator leaves the initial envelope unchanged, so the answer reduces to . If instead the given numerical function is interpreted as the self-reciprocal Hankel transform spectrum suggested by the printed equations 4 and 5, then and the alternative is
The factor ambiguity is present in the original PDF. No unique numerical attenuation coefficient follows until the power spectrum convention is fixed. The covariance strength has units of length in this longitudinal white noise model, making both attenuation exponents dimensionless.
Interpret the longitudinal Dirac delta function as the Markov approximation for a random medium. The two arguments on the left of the printed covariance must be and . The transverse covariance kernel is . Here statistical isotropy means transverse isotropy: a medium with a distinguished longitudinal white noise direction and a smooth transverse covariance is not literally isotropic in all three directions. Also, ideal Gaussian white noise replaces the original finite-variance field; it cannot simultaneously satisfy a pointwise normalization .
Write for the covariance strength of the refractive index fluctuations. Define the transverse power spectrum using the unnormalized forward Fourier transform printed in equation 3:
This is the spectrum of the fluctuations, excluding the deterministic mean index. Equivalently it is the zero-longitudinal-frequency slice of the three-dimensional fluctuation spectrum before the Markov approximation. The angular integral is , where is the Bessel function of the first kind. Consequently Fourier inversion and the Hankel transform give
The printed equations 4 and 5 omit these reciprocal factors, and the left-hand side of equation 5 should depend on . They are instead a consistent order-zero Hankel transform pair if their denotes .
Using , the mean-field solution in the Fourier transform convention is
Here is the Fresnel propagator. Finiteness of the integral ensures a finite screen wave phase variance. If the quoted power spectrum uses the self-reciprocal Hankel transform convention, the same result reads
These formulas describe identical media when ; assigning the same numerical function to both spectral conventions describes different covariance strengths.
The creation and annihilation operators obey
The two-point correlation function in their vacuum has Fourier amplitude . After cosmological horizon exit, , and the stated Bunch-Davies vacuum mode and give
The dimensionless power spectrum is consequently
Regulate the zero mode by a soft momentum and write the free modes as
The Wronskian normalization follows from the canonical commutator, while the power spectrum is . Inserting the creation part of on the ket and the annihilation part on the bra, their difference is precisely the Wronskian. For this gives, after taking and setting the irrelevant normalization ,
Equivalently, before removing the regulator, the right-hand side is the soft three-point function divided by .
Expanding the free field as
and using the vacuum creation and annihilation operators algebra gives
Thus the dimensional power spectrum is . Unlike a minimally coupled massless inflationary fluctuation, this conformally coupled field decays as and does not freeze at late time.
The creation and annihilation operators obey the canonical bosonic commutation relations
Since , the vacuum two-point correlation function is
For
one has . Comparison with the definition of the dimensionless power spectrum gives
where . On superhorizon scales, or , and therefore
Comparing the stated curvature power spectrum with at the pivot scale gives the primordial scalar amplitude
The scalar spectral index is
Sufficiently close to the hilltop, is suppressed by and the term controls the spectral tilt.
Expand . For a Gaussian linear density field, odd linear correlators vanish and Wick theorem reduces the fourth-order terms to products of the linear power spectrum. Hence
The two contractions of the two quadratic fields give
The three choices for which argument of carries the external momentum give
Thus the contribution conventionally called is . These are the two one-loop diagrams of the one-loop matter power spectrum.
For a scale-invariant primordial bispectrum, the displayed shape function is invariant under common rescaling of all three wavenumbers. It isolates triangle dependence from the overall power spectrum amplitude. It indicates intrinsic shape preference but alone does not determine observational signal-to-noise, which also depends on transfer functions, covariance and survey weights.
For a universal abundance depending on halo peak height, the peak-background split gives a potential-response coefficient , with the linear Lagrangian halo bias. If , the corresponding deterministic galaxy bias correction is , proportional to on sufficiently large scales. For a physical Eulerian tracer, , so . The deterministic tracer power spectrum is ; it remains nonnegative even if a negative correction changes the sign of the tracer-matter correlation.
Scale invariance Created 2026-10-07 Updated 2026-10-13
A law or statistical object is scale invariant if its form is unchanged by rescaling lengths, with any specified scaling weight for the fields. A dimensionless field's three-dimensional nonzero-mode power spectrum obeys when its statistics have this scaling. The meaning of invariance must specify whether zero modes and regulators are being transformed.
For a stationary quenched intrinsic curvature with power spectrum and finite second spectral moment, the bulk deficit satisfies
The moment is for mean-square differentiable curvature. Infinite-moment disorder and finite endpoint boundary layers can change the exponent, so this is a smooth bulk law rather than a universal law for all random polymers.
The equal-time two-point function of a de Sitter scalar has a contribution , giving the displayed dimensionless power spectrum per logarithmic wavenumber. At fixed comoving wavenumber it decreases as ; on short physical scales it reproduces the vacuum fluctuations of a massless scalar field in Minkowski spacetime. Its coincident integral is ultraviolet divergent, so the fixed-mode decrease cannot be interchanged with an unregulated integral over all modes.