English

Curvature perturbation spectrum from false vacuum inflation

Astrophysics 2009-06-23 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

In the inflationary cosmology it occurs frequently that the inflaton field is trapped in a local, transient minimum with non-zero vacuum energy. The difficulty regarding the curvature perturbation produced during such a stage is that classically the inflaton does not move so that the comoving hypersurfaces are not well defined at linear order in the scalar field perturbation. In this paper, assuming a mechanism of trapping which resembles a high temperature correction to the potential, we explicitly calculate for the first time the resulting power spectrum of the curvature perturbation by evaluating the quantum two-point correlation function directly. The spectrum is steeply blue with the spectral index n_R = 4.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0804.4488,
  title  = {Curvature perturbation spectrum from false vacuum inflation},
  author = {Jinn-Ouk Gong and Misao Sasaki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0804.4488},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

(v1) 17 pages, no figure; (v2) 18 pages, more clarifications and discussions added, to appear in JCAP

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:35:21.283Z