No Arabic abstract
We put the upper bound on the gravitational waves (GWs) induced by the scalar-field fluctuations during the inflation. In particular, we focus on the case where the scalar fluctuations get amplified within some subhorizon scales by some mechanism during the inflation. Since the energy conservation law leads to the upper bound on the energy density of the scalar fluctuations, the amplitudes of the scalar fluctuations are constrained and therefore the induced GWs are also. Taking into account this, we derive the upper bound on the induced GWs. As a result, we find that the GW power spectrum must be $mathcal P_h lesssim mathcal O(epsilon^2 (k/k_*)^2)$, where $epsilon$ is the slow-roll parameter and $k_*$ is the peak scale of the scalar-field fluctuations.
We revisit the effects of an early matter-dominated era on gravitational waves induced by scalar perturbations. We carefully take into account the evolution of the gravitational potential, the source of these induced gravitational waves, during a gradual transition from an early matter-dominated era to the radiation-dominated era, where the transition timescale is comparable to the Hubble time at that time. Realizations of such a gradual transition include the standard perturbative reheating with a constant decay rate. Contrary to previous works, we find that the presence of an early matter-dominated era does not necessarily enhance the induced gravitational waves due to the decay of the gravitational potential around the transition from an early matter-dominated era to the radiation-dominated era.
Measuring the primordial power spectrum on small scales is a powerful tool in inflation model building, yet constraints from Cosmic Microwave Background measurements alone are insufficient to place bounds stringent enough to be appreciably effective. For the very small scale spectrum, those which subtend angles of less than 0.3 degrees on the sky, an upper bound can be extracted from the astrophysical constraints on the possible production of primordial black holes in the early universe. A recently discovered observational by-product of an enhanced power spectrum on small scales, induced gravitational waves, have been shown to be within the range of proposed space based gravitational wave detectors; such as NASAs LISA and BBO detectors, and the Japanese DECIGO detector. In this paper we explore the impact such a detection would have on models of inflation known to lead to an enhanced power spectrum on small scales, namely the Hilltop-type and running mass models. We find that the Hilltop-type model can produce observable induced gravitational waves within the range of BBO and DECIGO for integral and fractional powers of the potential within a reasonable number of e-folds. We also find that the running mass model can produce a spectrum within the range of these detectors, but require that inflation terminates after an unreasonably small number of e-folds. Finally, we argue that if the thermal history of the Universe were to accomodate such a small number of e-folds the Running Mass Model can produce Primordial Black Holes within a mass range compatible with Dark Matter, i.e. within a mass range 10^{20}g< M_{BH}<10^{27}g.
We present a new realization of the resonant production of primordial black holes as well as gravitational waves in a two-stage inflation model consisting of a scalar field phi with an axion-monodromy-like periodic structure in the potential that governs the first stage and another field chi with a hilltop-like potential that dominates the second stage. The parametric resonance seeded by the periodic structure at the first stage amplifies the perturbations of both fields inside the Hubble radius. While the evolution of the background trajectory experiences a turn as the oscillatory barrier height increases, the amplified perturbations of chi remain as they are and contribute to the final curvature perturbation. It turns out that the primordial power spectrum displays a significant resonant peak on small scales, which can lead to an abundant production of primordial black holes. Furthermore, gravitational waves are also generated from the resonantly enhanced field perturbations during inflation, the amplitude of which may be constrained by future gravitational wave interferometers.
We investigate the generation of gravitational waves due to the gravitational instability of primordial density perturbations in an early matter-dominated era which could be detectable by experiments such as LIGO and LISA. We use relativistic perturbation theory to give analytic estimates of the tensor perturbations generated at second order by linear density perturbations. We find that large enhancement factors with respect to the naive second-order estimate are possible due to the growth of density perturbations on sub-Hubble scales. However very large enhancement factors coincide with a breakdown of linear theory for density perturbations on small scales. To produce a primordial gravitational wave background that would be detectable with LIGO or LISA from density perturbations in the linear regime requires primordial comoving curvature perturbations on small scales of order 0.02 for Advanced LIGO or 0.005 for LISA, otherwise numerical calculations of the non-linear evolution on sub-Hubble scales are required.
Recent observational constraints indicate that primordial black holes (PBHs) with the mass scale $sim 10^{-12}M_{odot}$ can explain most of dark matter in the Universe. To produce this kind of PBHs, we need an enhance in the primordial scalar curvature perturbations to the order of ${mathcal{O}(10^{-2})}$ at the scale $ k sim 10^{12}~rm Mpc^{-1}$. Here, we investigate the production of PBHs and induced gravitational waves (GWs) in the framework of textbf{$k$-inflation}. We solve numerically the Mukhanov-Sasaki equation to obtain the primordial scalar power spectrum. In addition, we estimate the PBHs abundance $f_{text{PBH}}^{text{peak}}$ as well as the energy density parameter $Omega_{rm GW,0}$ of induced GWs. Interestingly enough is that for a special set of model parameters, we estimate the mass scale and the abundance of PBHs as $sim{cal O}(10^{-13})M_{odot}$ and $f_{text{PBH}}^{text{peak}}=0.96$, respectively. This confirms that the mechanism of PBHs production in our inflationary model can justify most of dark matter. Furthermore, we evaluate the GWs energy density parameter and conclude that it behaves like a power-law function $Omega_{rm GW}sim (f/f_c)^n$ where in the infrared limit $fll f_{c}$, the power index reads $n=3-2/ln(f_c/f)$.