Can a vector field be responsible for the curvature perturbation in the Universe

By Konstantinos Dimopoulos. 2006

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

I investigate the possibility that the observed curvature perturbation is due to a massive vector field. To avoid generating a large scale anisotropy the vector field is not taken to be driving inflation. Instead it is assumed to become important after inflation when it may dominate the Universe and imprint its perturbation spectrum before its decay, as in the curvaton scenario. It is found that, to generate a scale invariant spectrum of perturbations, the mass-squared of the vector field has to be negative and comparable to the Hubble scale during inflation. After inflation the mass-squared must become positive so that the vector field engages into oscillations. It is shown that such an oscillating vector field behaves as pressureless matter and does not lead to large scale anisotropy when it dominates the Universe. The possibility of realizing this scenario in supergravity is also outlined.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9d0f63672bdfbf8fca81f59e6b016c0f1a53d59a

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Citations in the corpus

Vector Dark Matter from Inflationary Fluctuations (2015, background): “The production of the longitudinal mode and its superhorizon evolution was previously considered in [13].”
Gravity waves and non-Gaussian features from particle production in a sector gravitationally coupled to the inflaton (2012, unknown): “[62] K.”
Vector field models of inflation and dark energy (2008, background): “Even if the vector field does not drive the inflationary expansion, it might have a role in slowing the expansion rate or generating perturbations [20, 32, 33].”
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, background): “This Lagrangian includes the case of a massive (curvaton) vector field (when f ≡ 1) studied by [424, 425] and where the mass of the vector field is acquired via a non-minimal coupling to gravity to break conformal invariance.”
Gravitational production of vector dark matter (2020, background): “It is well known that the transverse components of a minimally coupled vector field produce scale-invariant density fluctuations during inflation [15, 34–36] therefore they can not constitute all the observed DM relic density.”