English

Adiabatic Media Inflation

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2019-12-11 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We study the dynamics of inflation driven by an adiabatic self-gravitating medium, extending the previous works on fluid and solid inflation. Such a class of media comprises perfect fluids, zero and finite temperature solids. By using an effective field theory description, we compute the power spectrum for the scalar curvature perturbation of constant energy density hypersurface ζ\zeta and the comoving scalar curvature perturbation R{\cal R} in the case of slow-roll, super slow-roll and ww-media inflation, an inflationary phase with ww constant in the range 1<w<1/3-1 <w <-1/3. A similar computation is done for the tensor modes. Adiabatic media are characterized by intrinsic entropy perturbations that can give a significant contribution to the power spectrum and can be used to generate the required seed for primordial black holes. For such a media, the Weinberg theorem is typically violated and on super horizon scales neither ζ\zeta nor R{\cal R} are conserved and moreover ζR\zeta \neq {\cal R}. Reheating becomes crucial to predict the spectrum of the imprinted primordial perturbations. We study how the difference between ζ\zeta and R{\cal R} during inflation gives rise to relative entropic perturbations in Λ\LambdaCDM.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1907.11784,
  title  = {Adiabatic Media Inflation},
  author = {Marco Celoria and Denis Comelli and Luigi Pilo and Rocco Rollo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.11784},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

31 pages, 1 figure. A number of typos corrected, improved discussion of reheating

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:32:25.051Z