Paper detail

'Constraint consistency' at all orders in Cosmological perturbation theory

We study the equivalence of two - order-by-order Einstein's equation and Reduced action - approaches to cosmological perturbation theory at all orders for different models of inflation. We point out a crucial consistency check which we refer to as 'Constraint consistency' that needs to be satisfied. We propose a quick and efficient method to check the consistency for any model including modified gravity models. Our analysis points out an important feature which is crucial for inflationary model building i.e., all `constraint' inconsistent models have higher order Ostrogradsky's instabilities but the reverse is not true. In other words, one can have models with constraint lapse function and shift vector, though it may have Ostrogradsky's instabilities. We also obtain the single variable equation for non-canonical scalar field in the limit of power-law inflation for the second-order perturbed variables.