Abelian Higgs model in power-law inflation: the propagators in the unitary gauge

Abstract

We consider the Abelian Higgs model in the broken phase as a spectator in cosmological spaces of general D space-time dimensions, and allow for the condensate to be time-dependent. We fix the unitary gauge using Dirac’s formalism for constrained systems, and then quantize the gauge-fixed system. Vector and scalar perturbations develop time­dependent masses. We work out their propagators assuming the cosmological background is that of power-law inflation, characterized by a constant principal slow-roll parameter, and that the scalar condensate is in the attractor regime, scaling as the Hubble rate. Our propagators correctly reduce to known results in the Minkowski and de Sitter space limits. We use the vector propagator to compute the equal-time correlators of electric and magnetic fields and find that at super-Rubble separations the former is enhanced, while the latter is suppressed compared to the vacuum fluctuations of the massless vector field. These correlators satisfy the hierarchy governed by Faraday’s law.