Curvature perturbation spectrum from false vacuum inflation

Abstract

In the inflationary cosmology it occurs frequently that the inflaton field is trapped in a local, transient minimum with non-zero vacuum energy. The difficulty regarding the curvature perturbation produced during such a stage is that classically the inflaton does not move so that the comoving hypersurfaces are not well defined at linear order in the scalar field perturbation. In this paper, assuming a mechanism of trapping which resembles a high temperature correction to the potential, we explicitly calculate for the first time the resulting power spectrum of the curvature perturbation by evaluating the quantum two-point correlation function directly. The spectrum is steeply blue with the spectral index n_R = 4.

(v1) 17 pages, no figure; (v2) 18 pages, more clarifications and discussions added, to appear in JCAP

References in corpus (5)

• Thermal Inflation and the Moduli Problem
• Cosmology with a TeV mass GUT Higgs
• The Density Perturbation Power Spectrum to Second-Order Corrections in the Slow-Roll Expansion
• On the Amount of Gravitational Waves from Inflation
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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Large-scale Perturbations from the Waterfall Field in Hybrid Inflation
• Curvature Perturbations and non-Gaussianities from Waterfall Phase Transition during Inflation
• Curvature perturbation spectra from waterfall transition, black hole constraints and non-Gaussianity
• No Large Scale Curvature Perturbations during Waterfall of Hybrid Inflation
• Vacuum decay in the presence of a cosmic string
• Non-Gaussianity from false vacuum inflation: Old curvaton scenario
• Curvaton as dark matter with secondary inflation