Typically the fluctuations generated from a decaying field during inflation do not contribute to the large scale structures. In this paper we provide an example where it is possible for a field which slowly rolls and then decays during inflation to create all the matter perturbations with a slightly red-tilted spectral index, with no isocurvature perturbations, and with a possibility of a departure from Gaussian fluctuations.
We consider General Relativity with matter and radiation, one of these fluids being coupled to vacuum. We find that Universe dynamics starts by an inflation phase if the coupled fluid has a negative energy density at early time. Then, there is always a finite scale factor singularity but when vacuum and matter are coupled and matter density behaves like a negative radiation density. Moreover, the convergence to the LCDM model is clearly easier to reach when vacuum is coupled to matter rather than to radiation. Two classes of theories are studied to illustrate these results.
A variation of sneutrino inflation based on chi^2 potential is considered where the inflaton and the late-decaying field are sneutrinos of different generations. The lighter, late-decaying sneutrino dilutes the gravitinos over-produced after inflaton decay and generates the matter asymmetry. It can also significantly contribute to the curvature perturbation, realizing the mixed inflaton-curvaton case. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) observables can distinguish this case from inflation with chi^2 potential, provided that the initial value of the late-decaying sneutrino is either an order …
We show that it is possible to combine an early phase of String Gas Cosmology which can explain the origin of the observed structures on cosmological scales with a short later period of power law inflation which creates spatial flatness. The resulting model is consistent with the ``swampland criteria'' and the constraints coming from the {\it Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture}. Such a construction is not possible using only canonical slow-roll inflation, but it can emerge in the warm inflation scenario or in cold inflation with an exponential potential. The resulting cosmology is non-singu…
In the standard inflationary paradigm, cosmological density perturbations are generated as quantum fluctuations in the early Universe, but then undergo a quantum-to-classical transition. A key role in this transition is played by squeezing of the quantum state, which is a result of the strong suppression of the decaying mode component of the perturbations. Motivated by ever improving measurements of the cosmological perturbations, we ask whether there are scenarios where this decaying mode is nevertheless still observable in the late Universe, ideally leading to a ``smoking gun'' signature of …
We investigate cosmological consequences of an extended gravity model which belongs to the same class studied by Accetta and Steinhardt in an extended inflationary scenario. But we do not worry about inflation in our model; instead, we focus on a topological object formed during cosmological phase transitions. Although domain walls appear during first-order phase transitions such as QCD transition, they decay at the end of the phase transition. Therefore the "domain wall problem" does not exist in the suitable range of pameters and, on the contrary, the "fragments" of walls may become seeds of…
Probing the Perturbative Reheating History of Decaying Oscillatory Inflation with ACT Constraints
College of Physics and Electronic Engineering, Chengdu Normal University（成都师范学院物理与电子信息学院）；Department of Physics, Xinzhou Normal University（忻州师范学院物理系）；School of Mathematics and Physics, University of South China（南华大学数学与物理学院）
This paper considers warm inflation as an interesting application of multi-field inflation. Delta-N formalism is used for the calculation of the evolution of the curvature perturbations during warm inflation. Although the perturbations considered in this paper are decaying after the horizon exit, the corrections to the curvature perturbations sourced by these perturbations can remain and dominate the curvature perturbations at large scales. In addition to the typical evolution of the curvature perturbations, inhomogeneous diffusion rate is considered for warm inflation, which may lead to signi…
We study the possible decay of a coherently oscillating scalar field, interpreted as dark matter, into light fermions. Specifically, we consider a scalar field with sub-eV mass decaying into a Fermi sea of neutrinos. We recognize the similarity between our scenario and inflationary preheating where a coherently oscillating scalar field decays into standard model particles. Like the case of fermionic preheating, we find that Pauli blocking controls the dark matter decay into the neutrino sea. The radius of the Fermi sphere depends on the expansion of the universe leading to a time varying equat…
We propose a novel scenario to generate primordial magnetic fields during inflation induced by an oscillating coupling of the electromagnetic field to the inflaton. This resonant mechanism has two key advantages over previous proposals. First of all, it generates a narrow band of magnetic fields at any required wavelength, thereby allaying the usual problem of a strongly blue spectrum and its associated backreaction. Secondly, it avoids the need for a strong coupling as the coupling is oscillating rather than growing or decaying exponentially. Despite these major advantages, we find that the b…
We discuss a new mechanism to enhance the spectrum of primordial tensor fluctuations in single field inflationary scenarios. The enhancement relies on a transitory non-attractor inflationary phase, which amplifies the would-be decaying tensor mode, and gives rise to a growth of tensor fluctuations at superhorizon scales. We show that the enhancement produced during this phase can be neatly treated via a tensor duality between an attractor and non-attractor phase, which we introduce. We illustrate the mechanism and duality in a kinetically driven scenario of inflation, with non-minimal coupling…
We propose a scenario where superheavy dark matter (DM) can be produced via symmetry restoration first-order phase transition during inflation triggered by the evolution of the inflaton field. The phase transition happens in a spectator sector coupled to the inflaton field. During the phase transition, the spectator field tunnels from a symmetry-broken vacuum to a symmetry-restored vacuum. The massive particles produced after bubble collisions are protected against decaying by the restored symmetry and may serve as a DM candidate in the later evolution of the Universe. We show that the latent …
We revisit the mechanism of primordial magnetogenesis during inflation by taking into account the dynamics of the stochastic noises of the electromagnetic perturbations. We obtain the associated Langevin and Fokker-Planck equations for the electromagnetic fields and solve them analytically. It is shown that while the backreactions of the electric field energy density may spoil inflation too early, but there are regions of parameter space where the usual decaying behavior of the magnetic fields are replaced by a mean-reverting process of stochastic dynamics. As a result, the magnetic fields set…
We consider a model of DBI inflation where two stacks of mobile branes are moving ultra relativistically in a warped throat. The stack closer to the tip of the throat is annihilated with the background anti-branes while inflation proceeds by the second stack. The effects of branes annihilation and particles creation during DBI inflation on the curvature perturbations power spectrum and the scalar spectral index are studied. We show that for super-horizon scales, modes which are outside the sound horizon at the time of branes collision, the spectral index has a shift to blue spectrum compared t…
We investigate for viable models of inflation that can successfully produce dark matter (DM) from inflaton decay process, satisfying all the constraints from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and from some other observations. In particular, we analyze near-inflection-point small field inflationary scenario with non-thermal production of fermionic DM from the decaying inflaton field during the reheating era. To this end, we propose two different models of inflation with polynomial potential. The potential of Model I contains terms proportional to linear, quadratic, and quartic in inflaton; wher…
The delta-N formalism is considered to calculate the evolution of the curvature perturbation in generalized multi-field inflation models. The result is consistent with the usual calculation of the standard kinetic term. For the calculation of the generalized kinetic term, we improved the definition of the adiabatic field. Our calculation improves the usual calculation of the evolution of the curvature perturbations based on the field equations and the perturbations, giving a very simple and intuitive argument for the evolution equations in terms of the perturbations of the inflaton velocity. S…
The ultra-slow-roll (USR) inflation represents a class of single-field models with sharp deceleration of the rolling dynamics on small scales, leading to a significantly enhanced power spectrum of the curvature perturbations and primordial black hole (PBH) formation. Such a sharp transition of the inflationary background can trigger the coherent motion of scalar condensates with effective potentials governed by the rolling rate of the inflaton field. We show that a scalar condensate carrying (a combination of) baryon or lepton number can achieve successful baryogenesis through the Affleck-Dine…
During or towards the end of inflation, the Standard Model (SM) Higgs forms a condensate with a large amplitude. Following inflation, the condensate oscillates, decaying non-perturbatively into the rest of the SM species. The resulting out-of-equilibrium dynamics converts a fraction of the energy available into gravitational waves (GW). We study this process using classical lattice simulations in an expanding box, following the energetically dominant electroweak gauge bosons $W^\pm$ and $Z$. We characterize the GW spectrum as a function of the running couplings, Higgs initial amplitude, and po…
We consider an ultra-light scalar field with a mass comparable to (or lighter than) the Hubble parameter of the present universe, and calculate the time evolution of the energy-momentum tensor of the vacuum fluctuations generated during and before inflation until the late-time radiation-dominated and matter-dominated universe. The equation of state changes from $w=1/3$ in the early universe to $w=-1$ at present, and it can give a candidate for the dark energy that we observe today. It then oscillates between $w=-1$ and $1$ with the amplitude of the energy density decaying as $a^{-3}$. If the f…
Standard Model Higgs Peaks: a Note on the Vacuum Instability during Inflation
Università degli Studi di Padova（帕多瓦大学）；INFN, Sezione di Padova（意大利国家核物理研究所帕多瓦分部）；National Technical University of Athens（雅典国立技术大学）；Université de Genève（日内瓦大学）
We clarify the behavior of curvature perturbations in a nonlinear theory in case the inflaton temporarily stops during inflation. We focus on the evolution of curvature perturbation on superhorizon scales by adopting the spatial gradient expansion and show that the nonlinear theory, called the {\it beyond} $δN$-formalism for a general single scalar field as the next-leading order in the expansion. Both the leading-order in the expansion ($δN$-formalism) and our nonlinear theory include the solutions of full-nonlinear orders in the standard perturbative expansion. Additionally, in our formalism…
We study the possibility that the approximate time shift symmetry during inflation is promoted to the full invariance under time reparametrization t \to \tilde t(t), or equivalently under field redefinition of the inflaton ϕ\to \tildeϕ(ϕ). The symmetry allows only two operators at leading order in derivatives, so that all n-point functions of scalar perturbations are fixed in terms of the power spectrum normalization and the speed of sound. During inflation the decaying mode only decays as 1/a and this opens up the possibility to violate some of the consistency relations in the squeezed limit,…
Bursts of particle production during inflation provide a well-motivated mechanism for creating bump like features in the primordial power spectrum. Current data constrains these features to be less than about 5% the size of the featureless primordial power spectrum at wavenumbers of about 0.1 h Mpc^{-1}. We forecast that the Planck cosmic microwave background experiment will be able to strengthen this constraint to the 0.5% level. We also predict that adding data from a square kilometer array (SKA) galaxy redshift survey would improve the constraint to about the 0.1% level. For features at lar…
We perform direct numerical simulations of forced and freely decaying 3D magnetohydrodynamic turbulence in order to model magnetic field evolution during cosmological phase transitions in the early Universe. Our approach assumes the existence of a magnetic field generated either by a process during inflation or shortly thereafter, or by bubble collisions during a phase transition. We show that the final configuration of the magnetic field depends on the initial conditions, while the velocity field is nearly independent of initial conditions.
Many models of the early universe predict that there should be primordial tensor perturbations. These leave an imprint into the temperature and polarisation anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The differential equation describing the primordial tensor perturbations is a second order differential equation and thus has two solutions. Canonically, the decaying solution of this equation in radiation domination is dropped as it diverges at early times and on superhorizon scales while it is then suppressed at late times. Furthermore, if there is an inflationary phase prior to the …
We revisit the efficiency of Schwinger mechanism in creating charged pairs during inflation. We consider a minimal setup of inflation in which the inflaton field is a complex scalar field charged under a $U(1)$ gauge field. There is a time dependent conformal coupling which pumps energy from the inflaton field to the gauge field to furnish a nearly constant background electric field energy density to drive the Schwinger mechanism. The coupling between the gauge field and the scalar field induces a time dependent effective mass for the inflaton field. The requirement of a long period of slow-ro…
Inflationary perturbations in multi-field theories can exhibit a transient tachyonic instability as a consequence of their non-trivial motion in the internal field space. When an effective single-field description is applicable, the resulting theory is characterized by fluctuations that propagate with an $imaginary$ speed of sound. We use the effective field theory of fluctuations to study such a set-up in a model-independent manner, highlighting the peculiarities and subtleties that make it different from the standard case. In particular, perturbations feature exponentially growing and decayi…
We show that in single field inflationary models the super-horizon evolution of curvature perturbations on comoving slices $\mathcal{R}$, which can cause the production of primordial black holes (PBH), is not due to entropy perturbations, but to the background evolution effect on the conversion between entropy and curvature perturbations. We derive a general relation between the time derivative of comoving curvature perturbations and entropy perturbations, in terms of a conversion factor depending on the background evolution. Contrary to previous results derived in the uniform density gauge as…
We study the role of the Standard Model Higgs condensate, formed during cosmological inflation, in the epoch of reheating that follows. We focus on the scenario where the inflaton decays slowly and perturbatively, so that there is a long period between the end of inflation and the beginning of radiation domination. The Higgs condensate decays non-perturbatively during this period, and we show that it heats the primordial plasma to much higher temperatures than would result from the slowly-decaying inflaton alone. We discuss the effect of this hot plasma on the thermalization of the inflaton's …
We analyse the evolution of primordial magnetic fields in spatially flat Friedmann universes and reconsider the belief that, after inflation, these fields decay adiabatically on all scales. Without~abandoning classical electromagnetism or standard cosmology, we demonstrate that this is not necessarily the case for superhorizon-sized magnetic fields. The underlying reason for this is causality, which confines the post-inflationary process of electric-current formation, electric-field elimination and magnetic-flux freezing within the horizon. As a result, the adiabatic magnetic decay is not a~pr…
Jefferson Physical Laboratory, Harvard University（杰斐逊物理实验室，哈佛大学）；Laboratory for Theoretical Fundamental Physics, EPFL（理论基础物理实验室，洛桑联邦理工学院）；Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, New York University（宇宙学与粒子物理中心，纽约大学）
We present a complete framework for numerical calculation of the power spectrum and bispectrum in canonical inflation with an arbitrary number of light or heavy fields. Our method includes all relevant effects at tree-level in the loop expansion, including (i) interference between growing and decaying modes near horizon exit; (ii) correlation and coupling between species near horizon exit and on superhorizon scales; (iii) contributions from mass terms; and (iv) all contributions from coupling to gravity. We track the evolution of each correlation function from the vacuum state through horizon …
A pseudo-scalar inflaton field can have interesting phenomenological signatures associated with parity violation. The existing analyses of these signatures typically assume statistical isotropy. In the present work we instead investigate the possibility that a pseudo-scalar inflaton is coupled to a vector field carrying a small but non-negligible vacuum expectation value (vev) coherent over our Hubble patch. We show that, in such case, correlators involving the primordial curvature perturbations and gravitational waves violate both statistical isotropy and parity symmetry. We compute the Cosmi…
Sources of isocurvature perturbations and large non-Gaussianities include field degrees of freedom whose vacuum expectation values are smaller than the expansion rate of inflation. The inhomogeneities in the energy density of such fields are quadratic in the fields to leading order in the inhomogeneity expansion. Although it is often assumed that such isocurvature perturbations and inflaton-driven curvature perturbations are uncorre- lated, this is not obvious from a direct computational point of view due to the form of the minimal gravitational interactions. We thus compute the irreducible gr…
In the context of single-field inflation, the conservation of the curvature perturbation on comoving slices, $\R_c$, on super-horizon scales is one of the assumptions necessary to derive the consistency condition between the squeezed limit of the bispectrum and the spectrum of the primordial curvature perturbation. However, the conservation of $\R_c$ holds only after the perturbation has reached the adiabatic limit where the constant mode of $\R_c$ dominates over the other (usually decaying) mode. In this case, the non-adiabatic pressure perturbation defined in the thermodynamic sense, $δP_{na…
