Cosmological gravitational particle production of massive spin-2 particles

Abstract

The phenomenon of cosmological gravitational particle production (CGPP) is expected to occur during the period of inflation and the transition into a hot big bang cosmology. Particles may be produced even if they only couple directly to gravity, and so CGPP provides a natural explanation for the origin of dark matter. In this work we study the gravitational production of massive spin-2 particles assuming two different couplings to matter. We evaluate the full system of mode equations, including the helicity-0 modes, and by solving them numerically we calculate the spectrum and abundance of massive spin-2 particles that results from inflation on a hilltop potential. We conclude that CGPP might provide a viable mechanism for the generation of massive spin-2 particle dark matter during inflation, and we identify the favorable region of parameter space in terms of the spin-2 particle's mass and the reheating temperature. As a secondary product of our work, we identify the conditions under which such theories admit ghost or gradient instabilities, and we thereby derive a generalization of the Higuchi bound to Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) spacetimes.

46 pages + references, 9 figures

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• Instability and backreaction of massive spin-2 fields around black holes
• Cosmological Perturbation Theory in Metric-Affine Gravity
• Preserving quantum information in $f(Q)$ cosmology
• Bimetric Starobinsky model
• Gravitationally produced Dark Matter and primordial black holes
• Classical Larmor formula through the Unruh effect for uniformly accelerated electrons
• Angular correlation and deformed Hellings-Downs curve from spin-2 ultralight dark matter
• Bispectrum Islands
• Dark Spin-2 Field Solitons as a Source of Electromagnetic Radiation
• On the absence of ghosts in quadratic bigravity
• Thermodynamics of the Primordial Universe
• Probing Spin-2 Ultralight Dark Matter with Space-based Gravitational Wave Detectors in the mHz Regime
• Purely gravitational dark matter production in warm inflation
• Dynamically induced spin-2 mass in a Weyl-invariant framework
• Cosmology of Gravi-Axions
• The bimetric model with an informational metric tensor