Testing the Starobinsky model of inflation with resonant cavities

Abstract

We show that the Starobinsky inflation model based on $R^2$ gravity has a special feature that it provides a unique scalaron-two-graviton vertex with a coupling proportional to $1/M_P$. In this model stochastic gravitational waves are produced when the scalaron - which is the massive scalar mode of the metric - decays into gravitons during reheating. This decay is accompanied by decay of scalaron into matter as well through a similar coupling, providing an efficient reheating. The stochastic gravitational waves thus produced have characteristic strain $h_c\sim 10^{-35}-10^{-34}$ in the frequency range $10^6-10^{12}\mathrm{Hz}$ which makes them accessible to resonant cavity searches for graviton to photon conversions. The detection of these high frequency gravitational waves would be a significant step in experimentally testing the Starobinsky inflation model.

arXiv comment6 pages, 1 figure; supplemental file attached in this version

References in corpus (26)

• f(R) theories
• Planck 2018 results. X. Constraints on inflation
• Towards the Theory of Reheating After Inflation
• Reheating after Inflation
• Reheating in Inflationary Cosmology: Theory and Applications
• Mission design of LiteBIRD
• Detecting High-Frequency Gravitational Waves with Microwave Cavities
• Gravitational Particle Production in Oscillating Background and Its Cosmological Implications
• Electromagnetic response of a Gaussian beam to high-frequency relic gravitational waves in quintessential inflationary models
• Gravitational Wave Detection with High Frequency Phonon Trapping Acoustic Cavities
• Probing Primordial Gravitational Waves: Ali CMB Polarization Telescope
• Upper limits on the amplitude of ultra-high-frequency gravitational waves from graviton-photon mixing
• Gravitational Effects on Inflaton Decay
• Calculations of Inflaton Decays and Reheating: with Applications to No-Scale Inflation Models
• Electromagnetic Antennas for the Resonant Detection of the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background
• Higgs-Dilaton cosmology: Are there extra relativistic species?
• Gravitational Wave from Graviton Bremsstrahlung during Reheating
• Reheating ACTs on Starobinsky and Higgs inflation
• Scale-invariance as the origin of dark radiation?
• Scalar field couplings to quadratic curvature and decay into gravitons
• Search for a dark-matter induced Cosmic Axion Background with ADMX
• Model independent bounds for the number of $e$-folds during the evolution of the universe
• Ultraviolet Unitarity Violations in Non-minimally Coupled Scalar-Starobinsky Inflation
• Post-inflationary GW production in generic higher (infinite) derivative gravity
• On the degrees of freedom count on singular phase space submanifolds
• Broadband limits on stochastic length fluctuations from a pair of table-top interferometers