No Arabic abstract
We consider the single field chaotic m^2phi^2 inflationary model with a period of preheating, where the inflaton decays to another scalar field chi in the parametric resonance regime. In a recent work, one of us has shown that the chi modes circulating in the loops during preheating notably modify the <zetazeta> correlation function. We first rederive this result using a different gauge condition hence reconfirm that superhorizon zeta modes are affected by the loops in preheating. Further, we examine how chi loops give rise to non-gaussianity and affect the tensor perturbations. For that, all cubic and some higher order interactions involving two chi fields are determined and their contribution to the non-gaussianity parameter f_{NL} and the tensor power spectrum are calculated at one loop. Our estimates for these corrections show that while a large amount of non-gaussianity can be produced during reheating, the tensor power spectrum receive moderate corrections. We observe that the loop quantum effects increase with more chi fields circulating in the loops indicating that the perturbation theory might be broken down. These findings demonstrate that the loop corrections during reheating are significant and they must be taken into account for precision inflationary cosmology.
Several recent proposals to embed inflation into high-energy physics rely on inflationary dynamics characterized by a strongly non-geodesic motion in negatively curved field space. This naturally leads to a transient instability of perturbations on sub-Hubble scales, and to their exponential amplification. Supported by first-principle numerical computations, and by the analytical insight provided by the effective field theory of inflation, we show that the bispectrum is enhanced in flattened configurations, and we argue that an analogous result holds for all higher-order correlation functions. These ``hyper non-Gaussianities thus provide powerful model-independent constraints on non-standard inflationary attractors motivated by the search for ultraviolet completions of inflation.
If the graviton is the only high spin particle present during inflation, then the form of the observable tensor three-point function is fixed by de Sitter symmetry at leading order in slow-roll, regardless of the theory, to be a linear combination of two possible shapes. This is because there are only a fixed number of possible on-shell cubic structures through which the graviton can self-interact. If additional massive spin-2 degrees of freedom are present, more cubic interaction structures are possible, including those containing interactions between the new fields and the graviton, and self-interactions of the new fields. We study, in a model-independent way, how these interactions can lead to new shapes for the tensor bispectrum. In general, these shapes cannot be computed analytically, but for the case where the only new field is a partially massless spin-2 field we give simple expressions. It is possible for the contribution from additional spin-2 fields to be larger than the intrinsic Einstein gravity bispectrum and provides a mechanism for enhancing the size of the graviton bispectrum relative to the graviton power spectrum.
We study the quantum mechanical evolution of the tensor perturbations during inflation with non-linear tensor interactions. We first obtain the Lindblad terms generated by non-linear interactions by tracing out unobservable sub-horizon modes. Then we calculate explicitly the reduced density matrix for the super-horizon modes, and show that the probability of maintaining the unitarity of the squeezed state decreases in time. The decreased probability is transferred to other elements of the reduced density matrix including off-diagonal ones, so the evolution of the reduced density matrix describes the quantum-to-classical transition of the tensor perturbations. This is different from the classicality accomplished by the squeezed state, the suppression of the non-commutative effect, which is originated from the quadratic, linear interaction, and also maintains the unitarity. The quantum-to-classical transition occurs within 5 - 10 e-folds, faster than the curvature perturbation.
A sort of planar tensor networks with tensor constraints is investigated as a model for holography. We study the greedy algorithm generated by tensor constraints and propose the notion of critical protection (CP) against the action of greedy algorithm. For given tensor constraints, a CP tensor chain can be defined. We further find that the ability of quantum error correction (QEC), the non-flatness of entanglement spectrum (ES) and the correlation function can be quantitatively evaluated by the geometric structure of CP tensor chain. Four classes of tensor networks with different properties of entanglement is discussed. Thanks to tensor constraints and CP, the correlation function is reduced into a bracket of Matrix Production State and the result agrees with the one in conformal field theory.
A generic feature of the known string inflationary models is that the same physics that makes the inflaton lighter than the Hubble scale during inflation often also makes other scalars this light. These scalars can acquire isocurvature fluctuations during inflation, and given that their VEVs determine the mass spectrum and the coupling constants of the effective low-energy field theory, these fluctuations give rise to couplings and masses that are modulated from one Hubble patch to another. These seem just what is required to obtain primordial adiabatic fluctuations through conversion into density perturbations through the `modulation mechanism, wherein reheating takes place with different efficiency in different regions of our Universe. Fluctuations generated in this way can generically produce non-gaussianity larger than obtained in single-field slow-roll inflation; potentially observable in the near future. We provide here the first explicit example of the modulation mechanism at work in string cosmology, within the framework of LARGE Volume Type-IIB string flux compactifications. The inflationary dynamics involves two light Kaehler moduli: a fibre divisor plays the role of the inflaton whose decay rate to visible sector degrees of freedom is modulated by the primordial fluctuations of a blow-up mode (which is made light by the use of poly-instanton corrections). We find the challenges of embedding the mechanism into a concrete UV completion constrains the properties of the non-gaussianity that is found, since for generic values of the underlying parameters, the model predicts a local bi-spectrum with fNL of order `a few. However, a moderate tuning of the parameters gives also rise to explicit examples with fNL O(20) potentially observable by the Planck satellite.