1 research outputs found
The Fermion Self-Energy during Inflation
We compute the one loop fermion self-energy for massless Dirac + Einstein in
the presence of a locally de Sitter background. We employ dimensional
regularization and obtain a fully renormalized result by absorbing all
divergences with BPHZ counterterms. An interesting technical aspect of this
computation is the need for a noninvariant counterterm owing to the breaking of
de Sitter invariance by our gauge condition. Our result can be used in the
quantum-corrected Dirac equation to search for inflation-enhanced quantum
effects from gravitons, analogous to those which have been found for massless,
minimally coupled scalars.Comment: 63 pages, 3 figures (uses axodraw.sty), LaTeX 2epsilon. Revised
version (to appear in Classical and Quantum Gravity) corrects some typoes and
contains some new reference