Gravitational waves from inflaton decay and bremsstrahlung

Abstract

The concept of early Universe inflation resolves several problems of hot Big Bang theory and quantitatively explains the origin of the inhomogeneities in the present Universe. However, it is not possible to arrange inflation in a scalar field model with renormalizable potential, such that it would not contradict the recent Planck data. For this reason, inflaton must have also higher derivative couplings suppressed at least by the Planck scale. We show that these couplings may be relevant during reheating and lead to non-negligible production of gravitons. We consider the possibility that the unitarity breaking scale for the model of inflation is lower than the Planck scale and compute production of gravitons during reheating, due to the inflaton decay to two gravitons and graviton bremsstrahlung process. The spectrum of produced gravitons is crucially dependent on reheating temperature and inflaton mass. We find that for low reheating temperature decay to gravitons lead to significant amount of dark radiation. Confronting this result with CMB constraints, we find reheating dependent bounds on the unitarity breaking scale. We also compare the obtained gravitational wave signals with the projected limits of future high frequency gravitational wave experiments.