Secular effects on inflation from one-loop quantum gravity

In this Letter we revisit and extend a previous analysis where the possible relevance of quantum gravity effects in a cosmological setup was studied. The object of interest are non-local (logarithmic) terms generated in the effective action of gravity due to the exchange in loops of massless modes (such as photons or the gravitons themselves). We correct one mistake existing in the previous work and discuss the issue in a more general setting in different cosmological scenarios. We obtain the one-loop quantum-corrected evolution equations for the cosmological scale factor up to a given order in a derivative expansion in two particular cases: a matter dominated universe with vanishing cosmological constant, and in a de Sitter universe. We show that the quantum corrections, albeit tiny, may have a secular effect that eventually modifies the expansion rate. For a de Sitter universe they tend to slow down the rate of the expansion, while the effect may be the opposite in a matter dominated universe.