Primordial Features as Evidence for Inflation

By Xingang Chen. 2011

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the primordial universe, fields with mass much larger than the mass-scale of the event-horizon (such as the Hubble parameter in inflation) exist ubiquitously, and can be excited from time to time and oscillate quickly around their minima. These excitations can induce specific patterns in density perturbations, which record the time dependence of the scale factor of the primordial universe, thus provide direct evidence for the inflation paradigm or its alternatives. Such effects are conventionally averaged out in theoretical and data analyses, but can be accessible for experiments targeting on density perturbations with high multipoles.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52a4197d193c6b25d88c22025a0a7c2f99c3d1e2

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Citations in the corpus

Inflation, Cosmic Perturbations and Non-Gaussianities (2013, background): “This function dependence differs significantly between inflation and alternative to inflation models [218, 225].”
Prospects for cosmological collider physics (2016, background): “In models that temporarily break scale-invariance, it is also possible that much heavier fields can be excited non-adiabatically and leave different signatures in the density perturbations [18, 19, 24].”
Planck2018 results (2018, background): “Periodic or quasi-periodic modulations of the power spectrum which extend over the entire observable range of wavenumbers can occur in a variety of models (cf., e.g., Danielsson 2002; Martin & Brandenberger 2003; Bozza et al. 2003; Chen 2012; Jackson & Shiu 2013).”
Oscillations in the stochastic gravitational wave background from sharp features and particle production during inflation (2020, background): “It would be interesting to examine how such a series of turns, giving rise to the classical clock signal when the bending is moderate [15, 86], affects Pζ when the bending is strong, and to study whether this leads to observable features in ΩGW.”
Trans-Planckian issues for inflationary cosmology (2012, background): “This is due to the fact that the initial conditions have been chosen on the surface M C = constant [68, 69].”
Planck 2015 results. XVII. Constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity (2015, unknown): “However, in multifield models residual oscillations after corner-turning can also lead to logspaced oscillations, just as in the resonance models (Chen 2011; Achúcarro et al. 2011; Battefeld et al. 2013; Chen et al. 2015).”