The Inflationary Perturbation Spectrum

Abstract

Motivated by the prospect of testing inflation from precision cosmic microwave background observations, we present analytic results for scalar and tensor perturbations in single-field inflation models, based on the application of uniform approximations. This technique is systematically improvable, possesses controlled error bounds, and does not rely on assuming the slow-roll parameters to be constant. We provide closed form expressions for the power spectra and the corresponding scalar and tensor spectral indices.