Steepest growth in the primordial power spectrum from excited states at a sudden transition

Abstract Sudden phase transitions during inflation can give rise to strongly enhanced primordial density perturbations on scales much smaller than those directly probed by cosmic microwave background anisotropies. In this paper, we study the effect of the incoming quantum state on the steepest growth found in the primordial power spectrum using a simple model of an instantaneous transition during single-field inflation. We consider the case of a general de Sitter-invariant initial state for the inflaton field (the α -vacuum), and also an incoming state perturbed by a preceding transition. For the α -vacua we find that k 6 growth is possible for α > 0, while k 4 growth is seen for α ≤ 0, including the standard case of an initial Bunch-Davies vacuum state. The features of an enhanced primordial power spectrum on small scales are thus sensitive to the initial quantum state during inflation. We calculate the scalar-induced gravitational wave power spectrum for each case.