English

One-Loop Tensor Power Spectrum from a Non-Minimally Coupled Spectator Field during Inflation

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-01-14 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We compute the full one-loop corrections to the primordial tensor power spectrum in an inflationary scenario with a non-minimally coupled spectator field, using the in-in formalism. We derive semi-analytic results for the scalar-sourced one-loop tensor spectrum and the effective tensor-to-scalar ratio, reffr_{\mathrm{eff}} . We consider two representative coupling functions: a localized Gaussian dip (Model G), which leads to moderate loop corrections, and a rapidly oscillatory coupling (Model O), which can yield much larger loop contributions. For Model G, we find a O(1)\mathcal{O}(1) correction to reffr_{\mathrm{eff}} while Model O can significantly enhance reffr_{\mathrm{eff}} by several orders of magnitude (relative to the tree-level value). We further calculate the energy density of primordial gravitational waves. Assuming that primordial black holes with mass 1012M10^{-12}M_{\odot} generated in this scenario, constitute all of the dark matter, we find that the results are several orders of magnitude lower than the sensitivities of Taiji/TianQin/LISA.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.08675,
  title  = {One-Loop Tensor Power Spectrum from a Non-Minimally Coupled Spectator Field during Inflation},
  author = {Zhe Li and Chen Yuan and Qing-Guo Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.08675},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

11 pages, 4 figures