Gravitational waves and the scale of inflation

Mirbabayi, Mehrdad; Senatore, Leonardo; Silverstein, Eva; Zaldarriaga, Matias

doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.91.063518

Title: Gravitational waves and the scale of inflation

Journal Article · Thu Mar 12 00:00:00 EDT 2015 · Physical Review. D, Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.91.063518· OSTI ID:1491084

Mirbabayi, Mehrdad ^[1]; Senatore, Leonardo ^[2]; Silverstein, Eva ^[2]; Zaldarriaga, Matias ^[1]

Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (United States)
Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA (United States)

Here, we revisit alternative mechanisms of gravitational wave production during inflation and argue that they generically emit a non-negligible amount of scalar fluctuations. We find the scalar power is larger than the tensor power by a factor of order 1/ε². For an appreciable tensor contribution, the associated scalar emission completely dominates the zero-point fluctuations of the inflaton, resulting in a tensor-to-scalar ratio r ~ ε². A more quantitative result can be obtained if one further assumes that gravitational waves are emitted by localized subhorizon processes, giving r_max ≃ 0.3ε². However, ε is generally time dependent, and this result for r depends on its instantaneous value during the production of the sources, rather than just its average value, somewhat relaxing constraints from the tilt n_s. We calculate the scalar 3-point correlation function in the same class of models and show that non-Gaussianity cannot be made arbitrarily small, i.e. f_NL ≳ 1, independently of the value of r. Possible exceptions in multifield scenarios are discussed.

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Research Organization:: Stanford Univ., CA (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)

Grant/Contract Number:: SC0008078; FG02-12ER41854

OSTI ID:: 1491084

Alternate ID(s):: OSTI ID: 1180012

Journal Information:: Physical Review. D, Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology, Vol. 91, Issue 6; ISSN 1550-7998

Publisher:: American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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Cited by: 46 works

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References (39)

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Erratum: On the validity of the perturbative description of axions during inflation Ferreira, Ricardo Z.; Ganc, Jonathan; Noreña, Jorge Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2016, Issue 10 https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2016/10/e01	journal	October 2016
On the validity of the perturbative description of axions during inflation Ferreira, Ricardo Z.; Ganc, Jonathan; Noreña, Jorge arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1512.06116	text	January 2015
Gravitational waves at interferometer scales and primordial black holes in axion inflation Garcia-Bellido, Juan; Peloso, Marco; Unal, Caner arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1610.03763	text	January 2016

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