Cosmological perturbations from an inhomogeneous phase transition

Abstract

A mechanism for generating metric perturbations in inflationary models is considered. Long-wavelength inhomogeneities of light scalar fields in a decoupled sector may give rise to superhorizon fluctuations of couplings and masses in the low-energy effective action. Cosmological phase transitions may then occur that are not simultaneous in space, but occur with time lags in different Hubble patches that arise from the long-wavelength inhomogeneities. Here an interesting model in which cosmological perturbations may be created at the electroweak phase transition is considered. The results show that phase transitions may be a generic source of non-Gaussianity.

18 pages, 3 figures, minor changes, accepted for publication in CQG

References in corpus (7)

• Detection of primordial non-Gaussianity (fNL) in the WMAP 3-year data at above 99.5% confidence
• Non-gaussianity from the second-order cosmological perturbation
• Non-Gaussianity from Symmetry
• Modulated Inflation
• Cosmological perturbations from inhomogeneous preheating and multi-field trapping
• Hybrid Curvatons from Broken Symmetry
• Modulated inflation from kinetic term