A quantisation procedure in the presence of an initial Kasner singularity: primordial gravitational waves from triaxially anisotropic pre-inflation

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss quantisation of cosmological tensor perturbations in the Kasner–de Sitter (KdS) space-time as a model of (pre-)inflation. Quantisation in such an anisotropic background has been argued to be problematic based on the fact that the initial Kasner singularity, where the spatial anisotropy blows up, causes divergences to the effective frequencies squared for the perturbations, which render the standard quantisation procedure relying on the existence of an adiabatic vacuum state inexecutable. Here, an essential aspect of the problem is that the ability in determining the quantum spectra of the fields is restricted. Without its knowledge, one cannot even choose physically favourable states like the Bunch–Davies vacuum in de Sitter. We here argue that this difficulty may be circumvented if only there is a period, even if temporal, after the singularity where certain adiabatic conditions for the fields are met and the standard procedure of second quantisation can be carried out within the framework of the WKB approximation. We demonstrate that our prescription for determining the quantum energy spectrum is useful in making physically meaningful predictions for the primordial gravitational waves (PGWs) in triaxially anisotropic KdS backgrounds. We confirm that, on short wave-length scales, the resulting spectrum and directional distribution of the PGWs are the same as de Sitter inflation, namely, scale invariant and isotropic.