Monopoles, Strings and Gravitational Waves in Non-minimal Inflation

Abstract

We discuss how in $SO(10)$ grand unification an observable number density of topologically stable intermediate mass ( $\sim 10^{14}$ GeV) monopoles survive inflation driven by a Coleman-Weinberg potential and non-minimal coupling of the inflaton field to gravity. The scalar spectral index $n_s$ is in excellent agreement with the current observations, and the tensor to scalar ratio $r\gtrsim 0.003$. The model also predicts the presence of intermediate scale topologically stable cosmic strings, and their gravitational wave spectrum reflects the amount of cosmic inflation experienced by the associated symmetry breaking. The discovery of these primordial monopoles and the stochastic gravitational wave background from the strings would provide important new insights regarding the symmetry breaking patterns in the early universe.

21 pages, 10 figures, matches version published in JCAP

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Inflation, superheavy metastable strings and gravitational waves in non-supersymmetric flipped SU(5)
• Composite Topological Structures in SO(10)
• A Predictive $SO(10)$ Model
• Probing Minimal Grand Unification through Gravitational Waves, Proton Decay, and Fermion Masses
• Imprint of PBH domination on gravitational waves generated by cosmic strings
• Gravitational waves from cosmic strings associated with pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone dark matter
• Quantum tunneling in the early universe: Stable magnetic monopoles from metastable cosmic strings
• First constraints on non-minimally coupled Natural and Coleman-Weinberg inflation and massive neutrino self-interactions with Planck+BICEP/Keck
• Gravitational Waves of GUT Phase Transition during Inflation
• On the cosmological abundance of magnetic monopoles
• Post-inflationary Leptogenesis and Dark Matter production: Metric versus Palatini formalism