The hybrid inflation waterfall and the primordial curvature perturbation**A preliminary version of this paper appeared as arXiv:1107.1681.

Abstract

Without demanding a specific form for the inflaton potential, we obtain an estimate of the contribution to the curvature perturbation generated during the linear era of the hybrid inflation waterfall. The spectrum of this contribution peaks at some wavenumber k = k*, and goes like k3 for k ≪ k*, making it typically negligible on cosmological scales. The scale k* can be outside the horizon at the end of inflation, in which case ζ = −(g2−⟨g2⟩) with g gaussian. Taking this into account, the cosmological bound on the abundance of black holes is likely to be satisfied if the curvaton mass m much bigger than the Hubble parameter H, but is likely to be violated if m≲H. Coming to the contribution to ζ from the rest of the waterfall, we are led to consider the use of the `end-of-inflation' formula, giving the contribution to ζ generated during a sufficiently sharp transition from nearly-exponential inflation to non-inflation, and we state for the first time the criterion for the transition to be sufficiently sharp. Our formulas are applied to supersymmetric GUT inflation and to supernatural/running-mass inflation.