Models Of Anisotropic Inflation Research Articles

CMB imprints of non-canonical anisotropic inflation

Effect of non-canonical scalar fields on the CMB imprints of the anisotropic inflation will be discussed in details in this paper. In particular, we are able to obtain the general formalism of the angular power spectra in the scalar perturbations, tensor perturbations, cross-correlations, and linear polarization in the context of the anisotropic inflation model involving non-canonical scalar fields. Furthermore, some significant numerical spectra will be plotted using the most recent data of Planck as well as the BICEP2 and Keck array. As a result, we find a very interesting point that the TT spectra induced by the tensor perturbations as well as by the linear polarization will increase when the speed of sound decreases.

Effective field theory of statistical anisotropies for primordial bispectrum and gravitational waves

We present the effective field theory studies of primordial statistical anisotropies in models of anisotropic inflation. The general action in unitary gauge is presented to calculate the leading interactions between the gauge field fluctuations, the curvature perturbations and the tensor perturbations. The anisotropies in scalar power spectrum and bispectrum are calculated and the dependence of these anisotropies to EFT couplings are presented. In addition, we calculate the statistical anisotropy in tensor power spectrum and the scalar-tensor cross correlation. Our EFT approach incorporates anisotropies generated in models with non-trivial speed for the gauge field fluctuations and sound speed for scalar perturbations such as in DBI inflation.

Primordial statistical anisotropies: the effective field theory approach

In this work we present the effective field theory of primordial statistical anisotropies generated during anisotropic inflation involving a background U(1) gauge field. Besides the usual Goldstone boson associated with the breaking of time diffeomorphism we have two additional Goldstone bosons associated with the breaking of spatial diffeomorphisms. We further identify these two new Goldstone bosons with the expected two transverse degrees of the U(1) gauge field fluctuations. Upon defining the appropriate unitary gauge, we present the most general quadratic action which respects the remnant symmetry in the unitary gauge. The interactions between various Goldstone bosons leads to statistical anisotropy in curvature perturbation power spectrum. Calculating the general results for power spectrum anisotropy, we recover the previously known results in specific models of anisotropic inflation. In addition, we present novel results for statistical anisotropy in models with non-trivial sound speed for inflaton fluctuations. Also we identify the interaction which leads to birefringence-like effects in anisotropic power spectrum in which the speed of gauge field fluctuations depends on the direction of the mode propagation and the two polarization of gauge field fluctuations contribute differently in statistical anisotropy. As another interesting application, our EFT approach naturally captures interactions generating parity violating statistical anisotropies.

Clustering fossil from primordial gravitational waves in anisotropic inflation

Inflationary models can correlate small-scale density perturbations with the long-wavelength gravitational waves (GW) in the form of the Tensor-Scalar-Scalar (TSS) bispectrum. This correlation affects the mass-distribution in the Universe and leads to the off-diagonal correlations of the density field modes in the form of the quadrupole anisotropy. Interestingly, this effect survives even after the tensor mode decays when it re-enters the horizon, known as the fossil effect. As a result, the off-diagonal correlation function between different Fourier modes of the density fluctuations can be thought as a way to probe the large-scale GW and the mechanism of inflation behind the fossil effect. Models of single field slow roll inflation generically predict a very small quadrupole anisotropy in TSS while in models of multiple fields inflation this effect can be observable. Therefore this large scale quadrupole anisotropy can be thought as a spectroscopy for different inflationary models. In addition, in models of anisotropic inflation there exists quadrupole anisotropy in curvature perturbation power spectrum. Here we consider TSS in models of anisotropic inflation and show that the shape of quadrupole anisotropy is different than in single field models. In fact, in these models, quadrupole anisotropy is projected into the preferred direction and its amplitude is proportional to g* Ne where Ne is the number of e-folds and g* is the amplitude of quadrupole anisotropy in curvature perturbation power spectrum. We use this correlation function to estimate the large scale GW as well as the preferred direction and discuss the detectability of the signal in the galaxy surveys like Euclid and 21 cm surveys.

Anisotropic inflation in the Finsler spacetime

We suggest the universe is Finslerian in the stage of inflation. The Finslerian background spacetime breaks rotational symmetry and induces parity violation. The primordial power spectrum is given for the quantum fluctuation of the inflation field. It depends not only on the magnitude of the wavenumber but also on the preferred direction. We derive the gravitational field equations in the perturbed Finslerian background spacetime, and we obtain a conserved quantity outside the Hubble horizon. The angular correlation coefficients are presented in our anisotropic inflation model. The parity violation feature of Finslerian background spacetime requires that the anisotropic effect only appears in the angular correlation coefficients if l' = l + 1. The numerical results of the angular correlation coefficients are given describing the anisotropic effect.

Anisotropy in inflation with non-minimal coupling

We study a new anisotropic inflation model, with an inflaton field nonminimally coupled with the gravity and a vector field. We find that the anisotropic attractor solution exists not only in the weak curvature coupling limit, but more interestingly in the strong curvature coupling limit as well. We show that in the strong curvature coupling limit, the contribution from the anisotropy is greatly suppressed.

Anisotropic inflation with the nonvacuum initial state

In this work we study models of anisotropic inflation with the generalized nonvacuum initial states for the inflaton field and the gauge field. The effects of the non-Bunch-Davies initial condition on the anisotropic power spectrum and bispectrum are calculated. We show that the non-Bunch-Davies initial state can help to reduce the fine-tuning on the anisotropic power spectrum while reducing the level of anisotropic bispectrum.

Large scale anisotropic bias from primordial non-Gaussianity

In this work we study the large scale structure bias in models of anisotropic inflation. We use the Peak Background Splitting method in Excursion Set Theory to find the scale-dependent bias. We show that the amplitude of the bias is modified by a direction-dependent factor. In the specific anisotropic inflation model which we study, the scale-dependent bias vanishes at leading order when the long wavelength mode in squeezed limit is aligned with the anisotropic direction in the sky. We also extend the scale-dependent bias formulation to the general situations with primordial anisotropy. We find some selection rules indicating that some specific parts of a generic anisotropic bispectrum is picked up by the bias parameter. We argue that the anisotropic bias is mainly sourced by the angle between the anisotropic direction and the long wavelength mode in the squeezed limit.

δN formalism in anisotropic inflation and large anisotropic bispectrum and trispectrum

We present the consistent δN formalism for curvature perturbations in anisotropic cosmological backgrounds. We employ our δN formalism to calculate the power spectrum, the bispectrum and the trispectrum in models of anisotropic inflation with the background gauge fields in Bianchi I universe. Our results coincide exactly with the recent results obtained from in-in formalism. To satisfy the observational constraints the anisotropies generated on power spectrum are kept small but large orientation-dependent non-Gaussianities can be generated. We study the Suyama-Yamaguchi inequality for the amplitudes of the bispectrum and the trispectrum in the presence of anisotropic shapes.

Anisotropic inflation with non-abelian gauge kinetic function

We study an anisotropic inflation model with a gauge kinetic function for a non-abelian gauge field. We find that, in contrast to abelian models, the anisotropy can be either a prolate or an oblate type, which could lead to a different prediction from abelian models for the statistical anisotropy in the power spectrum of cosmological fluctuations. During a reheating phase, we find chaotic behaviour of the non-abelian gauge field which is caused by the nonlinear self-coupling of the gauge field. We compute a Lyapunov exponent of the chaos which turns out to be uncorrelated with the anisotropy.