Effective Planck Mass and the Scale of Inflation

Abstract

A recent paper argued that it is not possible to infer the energy scale of inflation from the amplitude of tensor fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background, because the usual connection is substantially altered if there are a large number of universally coupled fields present during inflation, with mass less than the inflationary Hubble scale. We give a simple argument demonstrating that this is incorrect.

4 pages

References in corpus (7)

• The Effective Field Theory of Inflation
• Resilience of the standard predictions for primordial tensor modes
• Gravitational Waves and the Scale of Inflation
• How Well Can We Really Determine the Scale of Inflation?
• Detecting Primordial $B$-Modes after Planck
• The Effective Planck Mass and the Scale of Inflation
• Non-Gaussianities of primordial perturbations and tensor sound speed

Cited by in corpus (7)

• The Quest for B Modes from Inflationary Gravitational Waves
• Opening up the QCD axion window
• Rolling axions during inflation: perturbativity and signatures
• Tensor Squeezed Limits and the Higuchi Bound
• Aspects of the Dark Dimension in Cosmology
• Massive Fields as Systematics for Single Field Inflation
• Non-equilibrium evolution of quantum fields during inflation and late accelerating expansion