On the consistency of de Sitter vacua

In this paper the consistency of the de Sitter invariant alpha-vacua, which have been introduced as simple tools to study the effects of transplanckian physics, is investigated. In particular possible non renormalization problems are discussed, as well as non standard properties of Greens functions. We also discuss the non thermal properties of the alpha-vacua and the necessity of alpha to change. The conclusion is that none of these problems necessarily exclude an application of the alpha-vacua to inflation.