Large-scale anomalies from primordial dissipation

Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2005

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe microwave background data suggest that the primordial spectrum of scalar curvature fluctuations is suppressed at small wavenumbers. We propose a UV/IR mixing effect in small-field inflationary models that can explain the observable deviation in WMAP data from the concordance model. Specifically, in inflationary models where the inflaton couples to an asymptotically free gauge theory, the radiative corrections to the effective inflaton potential can be anomalously large. This occurs for small values of the inflaton field which are of the order of the gauge theory strong coupling scale. Radiative corrections cause the inflaton potential to blow up at small values of the inflaton field. As a result, these corrections can violate the slow-roll condition at the initial stage of the inflation and suppress the production of scalar density perturbations.

Physical Review D, 2004

We compute the primordial scalar, vector and tensor metric perturbations arising from quantum field inflation. Quantum field inflation takes into account the nonperturbative quantum dynamics of the inflaton consistently coupled to the dynamics of the (classical) cosmological metric. For chaotic inflation, the quantum treatment avoids the unnatural requirements of an initial state with all the energy in the zero mode. For new inflation it allows a consistent treatment of the explosive particle production due to spinodal instabilities. Quantum field inflation (under conditions that are the quantum analog of slow-roll) leads, upon evolution, to the formation of a condensate starting a regime of effective classical inflation. We compute the primordial perturbations taking the dominant quantum effects into account. The results for the scalar, vector and tensor primordial perturbations are expressed in terms of the classical inflation results. For a N-component field in a ON symmetric model, adiabatic fluctuations dominate while isocurvature or entropy fluctuations are negligible. The results agree with the current Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe observations and predict corrections to the power spectrum in classical inflation. Such corrections are estimated to be of the order of m 2 NH 2 , where m is the inflaton mass and H the Hubble constant at the moment of horizon crossing. An upper estimate turns to be about 4% for the cosmologically relevant scales. This quantum field treatment of inflation provides the foundations to the classical inflation and permits to compute quantum corrections to it.

Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2011

We compute the primordial curvature spectrum generated during warm inflation, including shear viscous effects. The primordial spectrum is dominated by the thermal fluctuations of the radiation bath, sourced by the dissipative term of the inflaton field. The dissipative coefficient Υ, computed from first principles in the close-to-equilibrium approximation, depends in general on the temperature T , and this dependence renders the system of the linear fluctuations coupled. Whenever the dissipative coefficient is larger than the Hubble expansion rate H, there is a growing mode in the fluctuations before horizon crossing. However, dissipation intrinsically means departures from equilibrium, and therefore the presence of a shear viscous pressure in the radiation fluid. This in turn acts as an extra friction term for the radiation fluctuations that tends to damp the growth of the perturbations. Independently of the T functional dependence of the dissipation and the shear viscosity, we find that when the shear viscous coefficient ζs is larger than 3ρr/H at horizon crossing, ρr being the radiation energy density, the shear damping effect wins and there is no growing mode in the spectrum.

Physical Review D, 2013

We present new constraints on possible features in the primordial inflationary density perturbations power spectrum in light of the recent Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies measurements from the Planck satellite. We found that the Planck data hints for the presence of features in two different ranges of angular scales, corresponding to multipoles 10 < ℓ < 60 and 150 < ℓ < 300, with a decrease in the best fit χ 2 value with respect to the featureless "vanilla" ΛCDM model of ∆χ 2 ≃ 9 in both cases.

Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2020

At the end of inflation, the inflaton oscillates at the bottom of its potential and these oscillations trigger a parametric instability for scalar fluctuations with wavelength λ comprised in the instability band (3Hm) −1/2 < λ < H −1 , where H is the Hubble parameter and m the curvature of the potential at its minimum. This "metric preheating" instability, which proceeds in the narrow resonance regime, leads to various interesting phenomena such as early structure formation, production of gravitational waves and formation of primordial black holes. In this work we study its fate in the presence of interactions with additional degrees of freedom, in the form of perturbative decay of the inflaton into a perfect fluid. Indeed, in order to ensure a complete transition from inflation to the radiation-dominated era, metric preheating must be considered together with perturbative reheating. We find that the decay of the inflaton does not alter the instability structure until the fluid dominates the universe content. As an application, we discuss the impact of the inflaton decay on the production of primordial black holes from the instability. We stress the difference between scalar field and perfect fluid fluctuations and explain why usual results concerning the formation of primordial black holes from perfect fluid inhomogeneities cannot be used, clarifying some recent statements made in the literature.

1998

The energy and time scales during the inflationary stage of the universe calls for an out of equilibrium quantum field treatment. Moreover, the high energy densities involved make necessary the use of non-perturbative approaches as large N and Hartree methods. We start these lectures by introducing such non-perturbative out of equilibrium methods in cosmological universes. We discuss the renormalization procedure and the choice of initial conditions. We then study the nonlinear dynamics of quantum fields in matter and radiation dominated FRW and de Sitter universes. For a variety of initial conditions, we compute the evolution of the inflaton,its quantum fluctuations and the equation of state. We investigate the explosive particle production due to spinodal unstabilities and parametric amplification in FRW and de Sitter universes with and without symmetry breaking.We find that the particle production is sensitive to the expansion of the universe.For symmetry breaking scenarios, we determine generic late time fields behavior for FRW and deSitter cosmologies.We find that quantum fluctuations damp in FRW as the square of the scale factor while the order parameter approaches a minimum of the potential at the same rate.We con- sider an O(N) inflaton model coupled self-consistently to gravity in the semi- classical approximation for a `new inflation' scenario. We find that spinodal instabilities drive the growth of non-perturbatively large quantum fluctuations which shut off inflation. These fluctuations assemble with the inflaton zero mode yielding a new effective field that actually rolls down behaving classi- cally. We compute the amplitude and index for scalar density and tensor perturbations. In all models of this type the spinodal instabilities produce a `red' spectrum of primordial scalar density perturbations.

2021

We study small field models of inflation, which, against previous expectations, yield significant Gravitational Wave (GW) signal while reproducing other measured observable quantities in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). We numerically study these, using previously published analytic works as general guidelines. We first discuss the framework necessary to understand model building, and some of its motivations. We review the slow-roll paradigm, derive the slow-roll parameters, and discuss different formulations thereof. We review the Lyth bound and its theoretical descendants, we outline the small/large field taxonomy and their characterization in the current nomenclature. We then present our models and the methods employed in their building and examination. We employ MCMC simulations to evaluate model likelihood and by process of marginalization extract the most probable coefficients for these inflationary potentials. An additional method employed is a multinomial fit, where we...

The simplest inflationary models predict a primordial power spectrum (PPS) of the curvature fluctuations that can be described by a power-law function that is nearly scale-invariant. It has been shown, however, that the low-multipole spectrum of the CMB anisotropies may hint the presence of some features in the shape of the scalar PPS, which could deviate from its canonical power-law form. We study the possible degeneracies of this non-standard PPS with the neutrino anisotropies, the neutrino masses, the effective number of relativistic species and a sterile neutrino or a thermal axion mass. The limits on these additional parameters are less constraining in a model with a non-standard PPS when only including the temperature auto-correlation spectrum measurements in the data analyses. The inclusion of the polarization spectra noticeably helps in reducing the degeneracies, leading to results that typically show no deviation from the ΛCDM model with a standard power-law PPS. CONTENTS

Nuclear Physics B, 1990

We examine in detail the properties of inflation determined from the most general renormalizable potential for a single real scalar field φ: V(φ) = Aφ4/4 + Bφ3/3 + Cφ2/2 + V0. We find sets of parameters that can strongly break scale invariance, with a valley in the usual Zel'dovich spectrum. Such a valley can lead to earlier galaxy formation and more large scale structure in the Universe than in the usual scale-invariant cold dark matter scenario. We also find that the parameters of the potential can be many orders of magnitude larger than what would be allowed without the inclusion of the cubic term, which can lead to high reheat temperatures Treh ~ 1015 GeV. We have mapped out all regions of parameter space and have identified those regions that produce interesting behavior, as well as the entire region that leads to an acceptable inflationary scenario with small enough fluctuations. We further explore the possibility of generating interesting non-gaussian adiabatic density fluctuations from this potential, and find that it is unlikely for general single scalar field potentials that do not contain false vacua in the path of the inflation, as significant non-gaussian behavior implies too large a fluctuation amplitude.

Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2015

We revisit the scenario where inflation is preceded by a radiation era by considering that the inflaton too could have been in thermal equilibrium early in the radiation era. Hence we take into account not only the effect of a pre-inflationary era on the inflaton mode functions but also that of a frozen thermal distribution of inflaton quanta. We initially discuss in detail the issues relevant to our scenario of a pre-inflationary radiation dominated era and then obtain the scalar power spectrum for this scenario. We find that the power spectrum is free from infrared divergences. We then use the WMAP and Planck data to determine the constraints on the inflaton comoving 'temperature' and on the duration of inflation. We find that the best fit value of the duration of inflation is less than 1 e-folding more than what is required to solve cosmological problems, while only an upper bound on the inflaton temperature can be obtained. Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Pre-inflationary radiation era 3 2.1 The little horizon problem 3 2.2 The little flatness problem 3 2.3 Local thermodynamic equilibrium 4 2.4 Small Φ 5 2.5 Initial conditions for the mode functions 6 2.6 Thermal initial state 6 3 Evolution of perturbations 8 3.1 Subhorizon primordial perturbations in the pre-inflationary radiation era 9 3.1.1 Justification for largeã 10 3.2 Evolution of primordial perturbations during inflation 11 3.3 Mode function matching and the power spectrum 12 3.4 Infrared divergences 16 4 Parameter estimation 17 5 Discussion and Conclusions 21