English

Beating the Lyth bound by parametric resonance during inflation

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2022-01-05 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We propose a novel mechanism for enhancing the primordial gravitational waves without significantly affecting the curvature perturbations produced during inflation. This is achieved due to non-linear sourcing of resonantly amplified scalar field fluctuations. Our result is an explicit scale-dependent counter-example of the famous Lyth bound, which opens up a promising perspective of producing detectable inflationary tensor modes with low-scale inflation and a sub-Planckian field excursion. We explicitly demonstrate the testability of our mechanism with upcoming Cosmic Microwave Background B-mode observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.12554,
  title  = {Beating the Lyth bound by parametric resonance during inflation},
  author = {Yi-Fu Cai and Jie Jiang and Misao Sasaki and Valeri Vardanyan and Zihan Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.12554},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

v1: 6 pages, 2 figures, comments are welcome. v2: 7 pages, 2 figures, updated references, minor modifications, accepted for publication in PRL

R2 v1 2026-06-24T02:29:15.691Z