Trace anomaly driven inflation

By S. Hawking, T. Hertog, Harvey Reall. 2000

162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper investigates Starobinsky's model of inflation driven by the trace anomaly of conformally coupled matter fields. This model does not suffer from the problem of contrived initial conditions that occurs in most models of inflation driven by a scalar field. The universe can be nucleated semiclassically by a cosmological instanton that is much larger than the Planck scale provided there are sufficiently many matter fields. There are two cosmological instantons: the four sphere and a new ``double bubble'' solution. This paper considers a universe nucleated by the four sphere. The AdS/CFT correspondence is used to calculate the correlation function for scalar and tensor metric perturbations during the ensuing de Sitter phase. The analytic structure of the scalar and tensor propagators is discussed in detail. Observational constraints on the model are discussed. Quantum loops of matter fields are shown to strongly suppress short scale metric perturbations, which implies that short distance modifications of gravity would probably not be observable in the cosmic microwave background. This is probably true for any model of inflation provided there are sufficiently many matter fields. This point is illustrated by a comparison of anomaly driven inflation in four dimensions and in a Randall-Sundrum brane-world model.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b415c3b24d3b8c1d264a47685b0e9fa4c9fbb1f6

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Citations in the corpus

Brane-World Gravity (2004, background): “The theory of gauge-invariant perturbations in brane-world cosmology has been extensively investigated and developed [303, 271, 24, 308, 99, 312, 369, 346, 286, 177, 272, 176, 331, 333, 190, 235, 265, 416, 258, 332, 417, 231, 266, 191, 123, 158, 234, 50, 127, 340, 385, 368, 285, 85, 90, 116, 41, 54,”
FRIEDMANN–ROBERTSON–WALKER BRANE COSMOLOGICAL EQUATIONS FROM THE FIVE-DIMENSIONAL BULk (A)dS BLACK HOLE (2002, background): “Actually this case corresponds to well-known anomaly-driven inflation [29] (for recent discussion, see [30]).”
Inflationary Cosmology in Modified Gravity Theories (2015, unknown): “However, if the action has an additional R(2) term as [80] [ α4N̄ (2)/ (192π(2)) ] ∫ d(4)x √ −g R(2), where α4 (>0) is a positive constant, we find (2/3)α1 + α2 = −α4N̄(2)/ (16π(2)).”
Modified Gravity and Cosmology (2011, unknown): “Cosmological perturbations While the theory describing cosmological perturbations in braneworld gravity has been well developed in recent years (see, for example, [842, 771, 847, 334, 1087, 991, 801, 202, 201, 548, 772, 547, 918, 919, 921, 920, 596, 716, 768, 1244, 742, 1245, 703, 705, 715, 769, 597”
The emergent universe: an explicit construction (2003, background): “Inflationary models based on higher-derivative curvature terms go back to the remarkably prescient work of Starobinsky [8] in which the de Sitter phase was driven by the trace anomaly of the energy momentum tensor (see also [9]).”