Deviations from Gaussian white noise in stochastic inflation

Abstract Stochastic inflation is widely used as a framework to study scalar field perturbations on an inflationary spacetime in a classical manner. In Starobinsky's seminal work and most of the subsequent literature, stochastic inflation is driven by a white noise. This is a consequence of a number of assumptions about the background metric, the window function, and the initial state. Given that noise is the central object in this approach, it is worthwhile to investigate how the noise is modified upon relaxing some of these assumptions. We show that while deviation from an exact de Sitter background maintains the white character of the noise (only with a time-dependent amplitude), deviation from the Heaviside window function or the Bunch-Davies initial state can produce colored noise. We calculate the power spectrum and the memory of the noise for a toy model with a piecewise linear window function. We also show that, in order to produce a colored noise, the deviation from the Bunch-Davies vacuum should essentially be a sum of two-particle states. The resulting noise is non-stationary and we find its instantaneous power spectrum in a concrete example. Furthermore, while deviations from de Sitter background and sharp cutoff do not affect Gaussianity, changing the initial state yields a non-Gaussian noise.