An official website of the United States government
A<sc>bstract</sc> The phenomenon of cosmological gravitational particle production (CGPP) is expected to occur during the period of inflation and the transition into a hot big bang cosmology. Particles may be produced even if they only couple directly to gravity, and so CGPP provides a natural explanation for the origin of dark matter. In this work we study the gravitational production of massive spin-2 particles assuming two different couplings to matter. We evaluate the full system of mode equations, including the helicity-0 modes, and by solving them numerically we calculate the spectrum and abundance of massive spin-2 particles that results from inflation on a hilltop potential. We conclude that CGPP might provide a viable mechanism for the generation of massive spin-2 particle dark matter during inflation, and we identify the favorable region of parameter space in terms of the spin-2 particle’s mass and the reheating temperature. As a secondary product of our work, we identify the conditions under which such theories admit ghost or gradient instabilities, and we thereby derive a generalization of the Higuchi bound to Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) spacetimes.
more »
« less
An analytic evaluation of gravitational particle production of fermions via Stokes phenomenon
A<sc>bstract</sc> The phenomenon of gravitational particle production can take place for quantum fields in curved spacetime. The abundance and energy spectrum of gravitationally produced particles is typically calculated by solving the field’s mode equations on a time-dependent background metric. For purposes of studying dark matter production in an inflationary cosmology, these mode equations are often solved numerically, which is computationally intensive, especially for the rapidly-oscillating high-momentum modes. However, these same modes are amenable to analytic evaluation via the Exact Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (EWKB) method, where gravitational particle production is a manifestation of the Stokes phenomenon. These analytic techniques have been used in the past to study gravitational particle production for spin-0 bosons. We extend the earlier work to study gravitational production of spin-1/2 and spin-3/2 fermions. We derive an analytic expression for the connection matrix (valid to all orders in an adiabatic parameterħ) that relates Bogoliubov coefficients across a Stokes line connecting a merged pair of simple turning points. By comparing the analytic approximation with a direct numerical integration of the mode equations, we demonstrate an excellent agreement and highlight the utility of the Stokes phenomenon formalism applied to fermions. We discuss the implications for an analytic understanding of catastrophic particle production due to vanishing sound speed, which can occur for a spin-3/2 Rarita-Schwinger field.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2114024
- PAR ID:
- 10434198
- Publisher / Repository:
- Journal of High Energy Physics
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of High Energy Physics
- Volume:
- 2022
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 1029-8479
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
We perform a comprehensive analysis of the scattering of matter and gravitational Kaluza-Klein (KK) modes in five-dimensional gravity theories. We consider matter localized on a brane as well as in the bulk of the extra dimension for scalars, fermions and vectors respectively, and consider an arbitrary warped background. While naive power counting suggests that there are amplitudes which grow as fast as O(s^3) where s is the center-of-mass scattering energy squared], we demonstrate that cancellations between the various contributions result in a total amplitude which grows no faster than O(s). Extending previous work on the self-interactions of the gravitational KK modes, we show that these cancellations occur due to sum- rule relations between the couplings and the masses of the modes that can be proven from the properties of the mode equations describing the gravity and matter wave functions. We demonstrate that these properties are tied to the underlying diffeomorphism invariance of the five-dimensional theory. We discuss how our results generalize when the size of the extra dimension is stabilized via the Goldberger-Wise mechanism. Our conclusions are of particular relevance for freeze-out and freeze-in relic abundance calculations for dark matter models including a spin-2 portal arising from an underlying five-dimensional theory.more » « less
-
A<sc>bstract</sc> Previous numerical investigations of gravitational particle production during the coherent oscillation period of inflation displayed unexplained fluctuations in the spectral density of the produced particles. We argue that these features are due to the quantum interference of the coherent scattering reactions that produce the particles. We provide accurate analytic formulae to compute the particle production amplitude for a conformally- coupled scalar field, including the interference effect in the kinematic region where the production can be interpreted as inflaton scattering into scalar final states via graviton exchange.more » « less
-
A<sc>bstract</sc> We study 1 + 1-dimensional SU(N) gauge theory coupled to one adjoint multiplet of Majorana fermions on a small spatial circle of circumferenceL. Using periodic boundary conditions, we derive the effective action for the quantum mechanics of the holonomy and the fermion zero modes in perturbation theory up to order (gL)3. When the adjoint fermion mass-squared is tuned tog2N/(2π), the effective action is found to be an example of supersymmetric quantum mechanics with a nontrivial superpotential. We separate the states into theℤNcenter symmetry sectors (universes) labeled byp= 0, . . . ,N– 1 and show that in one of the sectors the supersymmetry is unbroken, while in the others it is broken spontaneously. These results give us new insights into the (1, 1) supersymmetry of adjoint QCD2, which has previously been established using light-cone quantization. When the adjoint mass is set to zero, our effective Hamiltonian does not depend on the fermions at all, so that there are 2N−1degenerate sectors of the Hilbert space. This construction appears to provide an explicit realization of the extended symmetry of the massless model, where there are 22N−2operators that commute with the Hamiltonian. We also generalize our results to other gauge groupsG, for which supersymmetry is found at the adjoint mass-squaredg2h∨/(2π), whereh∨is the dual Coxeter number ofG.more » « less
-
We derive the equations governing the linear stability of Kerr–Newman spacetime to coupled electromagnetic-gravitational perturbations. The equations generalize the celebrated Teukolsky equation for curvature perturbations of Kerr, and the Regge–Wheeler equation for metric perturbations of Reissner–Nordström. Because of the “apparent indissolubility of the coupling between the spin-1 and spin-2 fields”, as put by Chandrasekhar, the stability of Kerr–Newman spacetime cannot be obtained through standard decomposition in modes. Due to the impossibility to decouple the modes of the gravitational and electromagnetic fields, the equations governing the linear stability of Kerr–Newman have not been previously derived. Using a tensorial approach that was applied to Kerr, we produce a set of generalized Regge–Wheeler equations for perturbations of Kerr–Newman, which are suitable for the study of linearized stability by physical space methods. The physical space analysis overcomes the issue of coupling of spin-1 and spin-2 fields and represents the first step towards an analytical proof of the stability of the Kerr–Newman black hole.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP09(2022)216
