English

Assisting pre-big bang phenomenology through short-lived axions

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2010-04-05 v3 Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We present the results of a detailed study of how isocurvature axion fluctuations are converted into adiabatic metric perturbations through axion decay, and discuss the constraints on the parameters of pre-big bang cosmology needed for consistency with present CMB-anisotropy data. The large-scale normalization of temperature fluctuations has a non-trivial dependence both on the mass and on the initial value of the axion. In the simplest, minimal models of pre-big bang inflation, consistency with the COBE normalization requires a slightly tilted (blue) spectrum, while a strictly scale-invariant spectrum requires mild modifications of the minimal backgrounds at large curvature and/or string coupling.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0206131,
  title  = {Assisting pre-big bang phenomenology through short-lived axions},
  author = {V. Bozza and M. Gasperini and M. Giovannini and G. Veneziano},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0206131},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

14 pages, latex, 1 figure included using epsfig. A few typos corrected, two references added, the figure slightly improved. To appear in Phys. Lett. B