English

Scale-invariance as the origin of dark radiation?

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2015-06-16 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Recent cosmological data favour R^2-inflation and some amount of non-standard dark radiation in the Universe. We show that a framework of high energy scale invariance can explain these data. The spontaneous breaking of this symmetry provides gravity with the Planck mass and particle physics with the electroweak scale. We found that the corresponding massless Nambu--Goldstone bosons -- dilatons -- are produced at reheating by the inflaton decay right at the amount needed to explain primordial abundances of light chemical elements and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background. Then we extended the discussion on the interplay with Higgs-inflation and on general class of inflationary models where dilatons are allowed and may form the dark radiation. As a result we put a lower limit on the reheating temperature in a general scale invariant model of inflation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1307.5298,
  title  = {Scale-invariance as the origin of dark radiation?},
  author = {Dmitry Gorbunov and Anna Tokareva},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1307.5298},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

15 pages, 4 figures; v2: replaced with revised version recently published