Pre-inflationary universe in loop quantum cosmology

Abstract: The evolutions of the flat FLRW universe and its linear perturbations are studied systematically in the dressed metric approach of LQC. When it is dominated by the kinetic energy of the inflaton at the quantum bounce, the evolution of the background can be divided into three different phases prior to the preheating, {\em bouncing, transition and slow-roll inflation}. During the bouncing phase, the evolution is independent of not only the initial conditions, but also the inflationary potentials. In particular, the expansion factor can be well described by the same exact solution in all the cases considered. In contrast, in the potential dominated case such a universality is lost. It is because of this universality that the linear perturbations are also independent of the inflationary models and obtained exactly. During the transition phase, the evolutions of the background and its linear perturbations are found explicitly, and then matched to the ones given in the other two phases. Hence, once the initial conditions are imposed, the linear scalar and tensor perturbations will be uniquely determined. Considering two different sets of initial conditions, one imposed during the contracting phase and the other at the bounce, we calculate the Bogoliubov coefficients and find that the two sets yield the same results and all lead to particle creations at the onset of the inflation. Due to the pre-inflationary dynamics, the scalar and tensor power spectra become scale-dependent. Comparing with the Planck 2015 data, we find constraints on the total e-folds that the universe must have expanded since the bounce, in order to be consistent with current observations.