Adiabatic initial conditions Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-11-05
Adiabatic initial conditions perturb all relevant local physical quantities along the same background time trajectory. For quantities with nonzero background time derivatives, their perturbations satisfy . For separately conserved barotropic fluids, cosmological energy conservation then gives
For example, pressureless matter and radiation in cosmology obey . Their relative particle-number ratio is unperturbed at leading order.
The density condition tests relative entropy between components. In a general nonbarotropic component it does not by itself eliminate intrinsic entropy, measured by . The stronger statement that every physical variable follows the same time shift includes the pressure and any independent field-velocity data. A single scalar species alone does not make the density-ratio test sufficient, since that test is then vacuous.
For vanishing total non-adiabatic pressure perturbation and negligible regular gradient terms, uniform-density curvature is conserved on superhorizon scales.[ref] Relating this to conserved comoving curvature perturbation also requires the appropriate regular adiabatic mode; a non-attractor phase such as ultra-slow-roll inflation needs separate analysis. The ordinary growing adiabatic photon mode selects coherent acoustic phases, explaining the adiabatic acoustic-peak spacing.
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.
The second Friedmann equation gives the first Hubble slow-roll parameter
Because ,
Thus
As , the kinetic energy decays as and the constant dominates. Hence approaches a constant,
This non-attractor background is ultra-slow-roll inflation.