Particle production during inflation and gravitational waves detectable by ground-based interferometers
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Inflation typically predicts a quasi scale-invariant spectrum of gravitational waves. In models of slow-roll inflation, the amplitude of such a background is too small to allow direct detection without a dedicated space-based experiment such as the proposed BBO or DECIGO. In this paper we note that particle production during inflation can generate a feature in the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves. We discuss the possibility that such a feature might be detected by ground-based laser interferometers such as Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo, which will become operational in the next few years. We also discuss the prospects of detection by a space interferometer like LISA. We first study gravitational waves induced by nonperturbative, explosive particle production during inflation: while explosive production of scalar quanta does not generate a significant bump in the primordial tensor spectrum, production of vectors can. We also show that chiral gravitational waves produced by electromagnetic fields amplified by an axion-like inflaton could be detectable by Advanced LIGO.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d906091d3e8046368de3a2b1c76559b6e99906ef
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Taiji program: Gravitational-wave sources (2018, background): “However, for a blue-tilted spectrum predicted by inflationary models beyond slow-roll or caused by the source term such as particle production [36] and spectator fields [37], the direct detection might be possible for future space-based interferometers [38].”
- Science case for the Einstein telescope (2019, background): “For example, large GW amplitudes are naturally produced in inflationary models where there are secondary fields [208] (not responsible for the inflationary period) with arbitrary spin, and coupled to the inflaton either directly or only through a gravitational coupling, or in models where some symme”
- Gravitational waves at interferometer scales and primordial black holes in axion inflation (2016, background): “The sourced GW are exponentially sensitive to the speed of the inflaton, so this mechanism is naturally enhanced at late times / small scales [40, 41], possibly opening new windows of exploration for inflation model building.”
- Observable Spectra of Induced Gravitational Waves from Inflation (2012, background): “[27] for an alternative scenario, where gravitational waves are induced by particle production during inflation”
- Non-Gaussianities and chiral gravitational waves in natural steep inflation (2012, background): “[17, 18, 19, 20] (see also [21]) are however performed in the regime where the backreaction of the gauge field on the rolling inflaton is negligible, and therefore inflation is obtained because V (Φ) (that is otherwise considered to have an arbitrary shape) is sufficiently flat.”
- 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].”
- Adding helicity to inflationary magnetogenesis (2014, unknown): “J C A P 1 0 ( 2 0 1 4 ) 0 5 6 of the metric is completely negligible: this model violates the Lyth bound [35] in a way that is analogous to the one discussed first in [36] and subsequently in [30, 37, 38], since it displays a large tensor-to-scalar ratio without Planckian excursions of the inflaton.”
- Inflation and String Theory (2014, background): “Besides the model-independent gravitational wave signal, a host of additional modeldependent signatures have been explored, including oscillations in the power spectrum [36], deviations from scale-invariance [759], non-Gaussianity [37, 760], chiral gravitational waves [260,759], and primordial black”
- Gravity waves and non-Gaussian features from particle production in a sector gravitationally coupled to the inflaton (2012, background): “One of the scenarios of [21] was further studied in [23] to account for the backreaction of the produced particles on the background inflaton.”
- 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).”