RT Journal Article
T1 Inflationary buildup of a vector field condensate and its cosmological consequences
A1 Bueno Sánchez, Juan Carlos
A1 Dimopoulos, Konstantinos
AB Light vector fields during inflation obtain a superhorizon perturbation spectrum when their conformal invariance is appropriately broken. Such perturbations, by means of some suitable mechanism (e.g. the vector curvaton mechanism), can contribute to the curvature perturbation in the Universe and produce characteristic signals, such as statistical anisotropy, on the microwave sky, most recently surveyed by the Planck satellite mission. The magnitude of such characteristic features crucially depends on the magnitude of the vector condensate generated during inflation. However, the expectation value of this condensate has so-far been taken as a free parameter, lacking a definite prediction or a physically motivated estimate. In this paper, we study the stochastic evolution of the vector condensate and obtain an estimate for its magnitude. Our study is mainly focused in the supergravity inspired case when the kinetic function and mass of the vector boson is time-varying during inflation, but other cases are also explored such as a parity violating axial theory or a non-minimal coupling between the vector field and gravity. As an example, we apply our findings in the context of the vector curvaton mechanism and contrast our results with current observations.
PB IOPscience
SN 1475-7516
YR 2014
FD 2014-08-16
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/34569
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/34569
LA eng
NO Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN)
NO Lancaster-Manchester-Sheffield Consortium for Fundamental Physics
DS Docta Complutense
RD 9 abr 2025