CMB fluctuations and string compactification scales

Abstract

We propose a mechanism for the generation of temperature fluctuations of cosmic microwave background. We consider a large number of fields, such as Kaluza–Klein modes and string excitations. Each field contributes to the gravitational potential by a small amount, but an observable level of temperature fluctuations is achieved by summing up the contribution of typically of order 1014 fields. Tensor fluctuations are hardly affected by these fields. Our mechanism is based on purely quantum effects of the fields which are classically at rest, and is different from the one in slow-roll inflation. Using the observed data, we find constraints on the parameters of this model, such as the size of the extra dimensions and the string scale. Our model predicts a particular pattern of non-gaussianity with a small magnitude.