Are inflationary predictions sensitive to very high energy physics

By C. Burgess, J. Cline, François Lemieux, R. Holman. 2002

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It has been proposed that the successful inflationary description of density perturbations on cosmological scales is sensitive to the details of physics at extremely high (trans-Planckian) energies. We test this proposal by examining how inflationary predictions depend on higher-energy scales within a simple model where the higher-energy physics is well understood. We find the best of all possible worlds: inflationary predictions are robust against the vast majority of high-energy effects, but can be sensitive to some effects in certain circumstances, in a way which does not violate ordinary notions of decoupling. This implies both that the comparison of inflationary predictions with CMB data is meaningful, and that it is also worth searching for small deviations from the standard results in the hopes of learning about very high energies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atmospheric Science, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ffe40f5f674c09ec5897159d5f807422172c5f79

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Citations in the corpus

Power-counting and the validity of the classical approximation during inflation (2009, background): “In this case its presence can generate observable deviations from standard inflationary predictions [17].”
Trans-Planckian issues for inflationary cosmology (2012, methodology): “in the work of [41], even in the context of effective field theory and local Lorentz invariance it is possible for the pre-inflationary dynamics to produce states which deviate from the standard Bunch–Davies vacuum and for which hence the corrections to the power spectrum are larger.”
Does the small CMB quadrupole moment suggest new physics (2003, background): “Recently [8] studied two other possibilities: an oscillating scalar field χ coupling to the inflaton can temporariliy suppress inflaton fluctuations, leading to a cutoff at low k; a prior period of matter or radiation domination before the beginning of inflation has a similar effect [9].”
Effective theories of single field inflation when heavy fields matter (2012, background): “[28–30] for a complimentary discussion of the effects of heavy fields relevant at the beginning of inflation.”
Super-Hubble de Sitter fluctuations and the dynamical RG (2009, background): “This could happen because inflation is not eternal, instead beginning at the end of a pre-inflationary phase [22], or perhaps if dS space should prove to be only metastable, with the BD vacuum ultimately decaying on large scales due to the inhomogeneous structure, perhaps coming from the formation o”