New Sources of Gravitational Waves during Inflation
High Energy Physics - Theory
2015-05-30 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Abstract
We point out that detectable inflationary tensor modes can be generated by particle or string sources produced during inflation, consistently with the requirements for inflation and constraints from scalar fluctuations. We show via examples that this effect can dominate over the contribution from quantum fluctuations of the metric, occurring even when the inflationary potential energy is too low to produce a comparable signal. Thus a detection of tensor modes from inflation does not automatically constitute a determination of the inflationary Hubble scale.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1109.0542,
title = {New Sources of Gravitational Waves during Inflation},
author = {Leonardo Senatore and Eva Silverstein and Matias Zaldarriaga},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.0542},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
32 pages, 1 figure. v2: JCAP published version; some overestimates corrected; main results unchanged