English

Is there an effect of a nontrivial $c_T$ during inflation?

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2016-03-21 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Recently, we have shown that the propagation speed cTc_T of the primordial gravitational waves (GWs) might be nontrivially varying during inflation, which could induce local oscillations in the power spectrum of primordial GWs. In this paper, we numerically confirm that, although with a disformal redefinition of the metric the nontrivial cTc_T may be set as unity, the power spectrum in the frame with cT=1c_T=1 is completely the same as that in the original disformal frame, i.e., the oscillating shape in the power spectrum is still reserved, since here the effect of cTc_T is actually encoded in the nontrivially varying Hubble parameter. In addition, we also clarify how to obtain a blue-tilted GWs spectrum by imposing a rapidly decreasing cTc_T during inflation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1510.08716,
  title  = {Is there an effect of a nontrivial $c_T$ during inflation?},
  author = {Yong Cai and Yu-Tong Wang and Yun-Song Piao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.08716},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

16 pages, 9 figures; published version in PRD; references and comments added, presentation improved