Growth of power spectrum due to decrease of sound speed during inflation

Abstract

We study the amplification of the curvature perturbations due to a small sound speed and find that its origin is different completely from that due to the ultraslow-roll inflation. This is because when the sound speed is very small the enhancement of the power spectrum comes from the fact that the curvature perturbations at the scales smaller than the cosmic microwave background (CMB) scale become scale variant, rather than growing that leads to the amplification of the curvature perturbations during the ultraslow-roll inflation. At large scales, the power spectrum of the curvature perturbations remains to be scale invariant, which is consistent with the CMB observations, and then it will have a transient ${k}^{2}$ growth and finally approach a ${k}^{4}$ growth as the scale becomes smaller and smaller. Thus, the power spectrum can be enhanced to generate a sizable amount of primordial black holes. Furthermore, when the high order correction in the dispersion relation of the curvature perturbations is considered, the growth of the power spectrum of the curvature perturbations has the same origin as that in the case without this correction.