Cosmological perturbations

We review the study of inhomogeneous perturbations about a homogeneous and isotropic background cosmology. We adopt a coordinate based approach, but give geometrical interpretations of metric perturbations in terms of the expansion, shear and curvature of constant-time hypersurfaces and the orthogonal timelike vector field. We give the gauge transformation rules for metric and matter variables at first and second order. We show how gauge invariant variables are constructed by identifying geometric or matter variables in physically-defined coordinate systems, and give the relations between many commonly used gauge-invariant variables. In particular we show how the Einstein equations or energy-momentum conservation can be used to obtain simple evolution equations at linear order, and discuss extensions to non-linear order. We present evolution equations for systems with multiple interacting fluids and scalar fields, identifying adiabatic and entropy perturbations. As an application we consider the origin of primordial curvature and isocurvature perturbations from field perturbations during inflation in the very early universe.Comment: 96 pages, submitted to Phys. Rep; v2: minor changes, typos corrected, references added, 1 figure added, corresponds to published versio

Numerical calculation of second order perturbations

We numerically solve the Klein-Gordon equation at second order in cosmological perturbation theory in closed form for a single scalar field, describing the method employed in detail. We use the slow-roll version of the second order source term and argue that our method is extendable to the full equation. We consider two standard single field models and find that the results agree with previous calculations using analytic methods, where comparison is possible. Our procedure allows the evolution of second order perturbations in general and the calculation of the non-linearity parameter f_NL to be examined in cases where there is no analytical solution available.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures; v2 version published by JCA

The universality theorem for neighborly polytopes

In this note, we prove that every open primary basic semialgebraic set is stably equivalent to the realization space of an even-dimensional neighborly polytope. This in particular provides the final step for Mn\"ev's proof of the universality theorem for simplicial polytopes.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure. Small change

Second Order Perturbations During Inflation Beyond Slow-roll

We numerically calculate the evolution of second order cosmological perturbations for an inflationary scalar field without resorting to the slow-roll approximation or assuming large scales. In contrast to previous approaches we therefore use the full non-slow-roll source term for the second order Klein-Gordon equation which is valid on all scales. The numerical results are consistent with the ones obtained previously where slow-roll is a good approximation. We investigate the effect of localised features in the scalar field potential which break slow-roll for some portion of the evolution. The numerical package solving the second order Klein-Gordon equation has been released under an open source license and is available for download.Comment: v2: version published in JCAP, references added; v1: 21 pages, 11 figures, numerical package available at http://pyflation.ianhuston.ne