No Arabic abstract
We examine cosmological perturbations in a dynamical theory of inflation in which an Abelian gauge field couples directly to the inflaton, breaking conformal invariance. When the coupling between the gauge field and the inflaton takes a specific form, inflation becomes anisotropic and anisotropy can persist throughout inflation, avoiding Walds no-hair theorem. After discussing scenarios in which anisotropy can persist during inflation, we calculate the dominant effects of a small persistent anisotropy on the primordial gravitational wave and curvature perturbation power spectra using the in-in formalism of perturbation theory. We find that the primordial power spectra of cosmological perturbations gain significant direction dependence and that the fractional direction dependence of the tensor power spectrum is suppressed in comparison to that of the scalar power spectrum.
We derive a direct correlation between the power spectrum and bispectrum of the primordial curvature perturbation in terms of the Goldstone mode based on the effective field theory approach to inflation. We show examples of correlated bispectra for the parametrized feature models presented by the Planck collaboration. We also discuss the consistency relation and the validity of our explicit correlation between the power spectrum and bispectrum.
These notes present a detailed introduction to Maldacenas calculation of the three-point function generated by the simplest class of inflationary models: those with a single inflaton field whose potential satisfies the slow-roll conditions and whose quantum fluctuations start in the asymptotic Bunch-Davies vacuum state. The three-point function should be the most readily observed evidence for non-Gaussianities amongst the primordial fluctuations produced by inflation. In these inflationary theories the non-Gaussianities are predicted to be extremely small, being naturally suppressed by the small slow-roll parameters.
We investigate the scalar and the tensor perturbations of the $varphi^2$ inflation model in the strong-gravity limit of Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld (EiBI) theory. In order to consider the strong EiBI-gravity effect, we take the value of $kappa$ large, where $kappa$ is the EiBI theory parameter. The energy density of the Universe at the early stage is very high, and the Universe is in a strong-gravity regime. Therefore, the perturbation feature is not altered from what was investigated earlier. At the attractor inflationary stage, however, the feature is changed in the strong EiBI-gravity limit. The correction to the scalar perturbation in this limit comes mainly via the background matter field, while that to the tensor perturbation comes directly from the gravity ($kappa$) effect. The change in the value of the scalar spectrum is little compared with that in the weak EiBI-gravity limit, or in GR. The form of the tensor spectrum is the same with that in the weak limit, but the value of the spectrum can be suppressed down to zero in the strong limit. Therefore, the resulting tensor-to-scalar ratio can also be suppressed in the same way, which makes $varphi^2$ model in EiBI theory viable.
Enormous information about interactions is contained in the non-Gaussianities of the primordial curvature perturbations, which are essential to break the degeneracy of inflationary models. We study the primordial bispectra for G-inflation models predicting both sharp and broad peaks in the primordial scalar power spectrum. We calculate the non-Gaussianity parameter $f_{mathrm{NL}}$ in the equilateral limit and squeezed limit numerically, and confirm that the consistency relation holds in these models. Even though $f_{mathrm{NL}}$ becomes large at the scales before the power spectrum reaches the peak and the scales where there are wiggles in the power spectrum, it remains to be small at the peak scales. Therefore, the contributions of non-Gaussianity to the scalar induced secondary gravitational waves and primordial black hole abundance are expected to be negligible.
We provide an explicit solution representing an anisotropic power law inflation within the framework of rolling tachyon model. This is generated by allowing a non-minimal coupling between the tachyon and the world-volume gauge field on non-BPS D3 brane. We also show that this solution is perturbatively stable.