  Cosmological inflation generates a spectrum of density perturbations that can
seed the cosmic structures we observe today. These perturbations are usually
computed as the result of the gravitationally-induced spontaneous creation of
perturbations from an initial vacuum state. In this paper, we compute the
perturbations arising from gravitationally-induced stimulated creation when
perturbations are already present in the initial state. The effect of these
initial perturbations is not diluted by inflation and survives to its end, and
beyond. We consider a generic statistical density operator $\rho$ describing an
initial mixed state that includes probabilities for nonzero numbers of scalar
perturbations to be present at early times during inflation. We analyze the
primordial bispectrum for general configurations of the three different
momentum vectors in its arguments. We find that the initial presence of quanta
can significantly enhance non-gaussianities in the so-called squeezed limit.
Our results show that an observation of non-gaussianities in the squeezed limit
can occur for single-field inflation when the state in the very early
inflationary universe is not the vacuum, but instead contains early-time
perturbations. Valuable information about the initial state can then be
obtained from observations of those non-gaussianities.
