Gravity waves and non-Gaussian features from particle production in a sector gravitationally coupled to the inflaton

By N. Barnaby, Jordan Moxon, R. Namba, Marco Peloso, Gary Shiu, P. Zhou. 2012

167 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the possibility that particle production during inflation could source observable gravity waves on scales relevant for Cosmic Microwave Background experiments. A crucial constraint on such scenarios arises because particle production can also source inflaton perturbations, and might ruin the usual predictions for a nearly scale invariant spectrum of nearly Gaussian curvature fluctuations. To minimize this effect, we consider two models of particle production in a sector that is only gravitationally coupled to the inflaton. For a single instantaneous burst of massive particle production, we find that localized features in the scalar spectrum and bispectrum might be observable, but gravitational wave signatures are unlikely to be detectable (due to the suppressed quadrupole moment of non-relativistic quanta) without invoking some additional effects. We also consider a model with a rolling pseudoscalar that leads to a continuous production of relativistic gauge field fluctuations during inflation. Here we find that gravitational waves from particle production can actually exceed the usual inflationary vacuum fluctuations in a regime where non-Gaussianity is consistent with observational limits. In this model observable B-mode polarization can be obtained for any choice of inflaton potential, and the amplitude of the signal is not necessarily correlated with the scale of inflation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98b26948bd1718a7d20d743b09cc9f2668d8beb1

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Citations in the corpus

Gauge field production in supergravity inflation: Local non-Gaussianity and primordial black holes (2012, background): “In addition, gauge fields source tensor modes and lead to a stochastic gravity wave signal that could be detected at interferometers such as Advanced LIGO or Virgo [32, 34] (see also [35]).”
F-term axion monodromy inflation (2014, background): “Interestingly, the only known model which has been shown to satisfy the current bounds on non-Gaussianity in the scalar perturbations (Model II in [8]) also involve axions.”
Gauge fields and inflation (2012, background): “This will cause a birefringent (chiral) gravity wave production which has its own interesting observational prospects [77, 79, 82, 83].”
Reconstructing the spectral shape of a stochastic gravitational wave background with LISA (2019, background): “[6–29]), to models that break space-time symmetries during inflation, leading to a blue spectrum for primordial tensor modes (see e.”
Scale-dependent gravitational waves from a rolling axion (2015, background): “J C A P 0 1 ( 2 0 1 6 ) 0 4 1 In order to decouple as much as possible the fluctuations in the gauge field from the scalar perturbations that are strongly constrained by CMB measurements, we will assume as in [26] that there is no direct coupling between the inflaton and the field σ, and we will wri”
CMB-S4 Science Case, Reference Design, and Project Plan (2019, background): “Alternatively, they may become excited by the dynamics of the inflaton and their backreaction on the inflationary dynamics may lead to non-Gaussian correlations [88, 89, 90, 91].”
Gravitational waves at interferometer scales and primordial black holes in axion inflation (2016, background): “Like in the case of the detection of sourced GW at CMB scales [24, 38, 39, 75, 82], the main difficulty in producing a large sourced GW signal at interferometer scales is the unavoidable simultaneous production of scalar perturbations.”
The Quest for B Modes from Inflationary Gravitational Waves (2015, background): “…correspondence with the energy scale of inflation—has been augmented in models involving spectator fields that are excited from the vacuum during inflation and possibly enhance the tensor fluctuation spectrum (Senatore, Silverstein & Zaldarriaga 2014; Cook & Sorbo 2012; Barnaby et al. 2012).”