Inflationary Scalars Don't Affect Gravitons at One Loop

Abstract: Primordial inflation results in the production of a vast ensemble of highly infrared, massless, minimally coupled scalars. We use a recent fully renormalized computation of the one loop contribution to the graviton self-energy from these scalars to show that they have no effect on the propagation of dynamical gravitons. Our computation motivates a conjecture for the first correction to the vacuum state wave functional of gravitons. We comment as well on performing the same analysis for the more interesting contribution from inflationary gravitons, and on inferring one loop corrections to the force of gravity.