Inflation as a probe of short distance physics

By R. Easther, B. Greene, W. Kinney, Gary Shiu. 2001

253 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that a string-inspired Planck scale modification of general relativity can have observable cosmological effects. Specifically, we present a complete analysis of the inflationary perturbation spectrum produced by a phenomenological Lagrangian that has a standard form on large scales but incorporates a string-inspired short distance cutoff, and find a deviation from the standard result. We use the de Sitter calculation as the basis of a qualitative analysis of other inflationary backgrounds, arguing that in these cases the cutoff could have a more pronounced effect, changing the shape of the spectrum. Moreover, the computational approach developed here can be used to provide unambiguous calculations of the perturbation spectrum in other heuristic models that modify trans-Planckian physics and thereby determine their impact on the inflationary perturbation spectrum. Finally, we argue that this model may provide an exception to constraints, recently proposed by Tanaka and Starobinsky, on the ability of Planck-scale physics to modify the cosmological spectrum.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/81a478339e373e1a96e10ee3f390f7d7d5fb327a

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Citations in the corpus

Are inflationary predictions sensitive to very high energy physics (2002, background): “2.1 Conditions for Inflation 4 2.2 χ Oscillations and a Possible Pre-Inflationary Phase 5”
Signatures of short distance physics in the cosmic microwave background (2002, background): “Several groups [7,8,9,10,11] have previously analyzed a special case of this situation.”
A Note on inflation and transPlanckian physics (2002, background): “, [13][16] and as we have seen this can be expected on quite general grounds.”
Initial Conditions for Inflation (2002, background): “One option, described in [4,5] is to compute T μν by expanding φ into creation and annihilation operators, and simply discarding the contributions of all modes with proper momenta higher than some cutoff scale Λ.”
Inflation, holography, and the choice of vacuum in de Sitter space (2002, background): “which shows that the natural size of a transplanckian correction is given by H Λ in agreement with the claims in [12] [15].”
Trans-Planckian issues for inflationary cosmology (2012, background): “Whereas the prescription adopted by [27, 28, 31] leads to oscillations of the abovementioned magnitude, the choice made by [29] and studied in more detail in [32] leads to oscillations with amplitude suppressed by three powers of H/M C .”
Gravity with a dynamical preferred frame (2000, methodology): “Consequences of non-Lorentz invariant high frequency dispersion for the Hawking effect have previously been studied using 1+1 dimensional model field theories in which higher spatial derivative terms are added to the action (for a review see [14]), and recently such models have been generalized to f”
Modern Tests of Lorentz Invariance (2005, background): “A number of authors have addressed the possible signatures of trans-Planckian physics in the CMB, for a sampling see [94, 212, 214, 262, 101, 164, 66, 236] and references therein.”
Monodromy in the CMB: Gravity Waves and String Inflation (2008, background): “Indeed, without considering specific mechanisms, the problem of testing UV-sensitive contributions to inflation is very difficult a priori [37].”