We compute the growth of the mean square of quantum fluctuations of test fields with small effective mass during a slowly changing, nearly de Sitter stage which takes place in different inflationary models. We consider a minimally coupled scalar with a small mass, a modulus with an effective mass $\propto H^2$ (with $H$ the Hubble parameter), and a massless nonminimally coupled scalar in the test field approximation and compare the growth of their relative mean square with the one of gauge-invariant inflaton fluctuations. We find that in most of the single field inflationary models the mean square gauge-invariant inflaton fluctuation grows faster than any test field with a non-negative effective mass. Hybrid inflationary models can be an exception: the mean square of a test field can dominate over the gauge-invariant inflaton fluctuation one on suitably chosen parameters. We also compute the stochastic growth of quantum fluctuations of a second field, relaxing the assumption of its zero homogeneous value, in a generic inflationary model; as a main result, we obtain that the equation of motion of a gauge-invariant variable associated, order by order, with a generic quantum scalar fluctuation during inflation can be obtained only if we use the number of e-folds as the time variable in the corresponding Langevin and Fokker-Planck equations for the stochastic approach. We employ this approach to derive some bounds for the case of a model with two massive fields.

• Received 30 March 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.82.064020