English

Implications of purely classical gravity for inflationary tensor modes

High Energy Physics - Theory 2014-10-13 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We discuss the implications of purely classical, instead of quantum, theory of gravity for the gravitational wave spectrum generated during inflation. We show that a positive detection of primordial gravitational waves will no longer suffice to determine the scale of inflation in this case -- even a high-scale model of inflation can bypass the observational constraints due to large uncertainties in the initial classical amplitude of the tensor modes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1211.4678,
  title  = {Implications of purely classical gravity for inflationary tensor modes},
  author = {Amjad Ashoorioon and P. S. Bhupal Dev and Anupam Mazumdar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1211.4678},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

v1: 4 pages; v2:6 pages. This is the first paper to argue that a positive detection of B-modes would signify that initial conditions for primordial gravity waves is set by quantum initial conditions and not by classical ones

R2 v1 2026-06-21T22:41:27.050Z