Inflationary dynamics at infinity

Filip R. Menezes, Jochen Schafer
Comments: 10 pages, 8 figures

We investigate the dynamics of the inflationary phase of the Universe on a (massless) flat background. The theory consists of a quantum field theory and a classical theory of gravity coupled to a repulsive scalar field. We demonstrate that the energy divergence between the two theories is proportional to the cosmological constant, which is equal to the one between the two classical theories on a flat background. This implies that in a flat universe with a finite cosmological constant, the timelike evolution at infinity justifies the importance of a Newtonian mass term, which is used as a measure of the cosmological constant.