Gravitons and Temperature Fluctuation Correlations from Inflation

2025/07/30 by Ford, L. H., Ho, I-Tai, Wu, Chun-Hsien
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2507.22835

Abstract

Inflationary tensor perturbations are treated as arising from a bath of gravitons produced by quantum particle creation at the end of inflation. We calculate the correlation function of the CMB temperature fluctuations produced by these gravitons in a model with an infrared cut off. The CMB photons are emitted from within a last scattering shell of finite thickness in redshift. We find the correlation function in terms of the separation of a pair of spacetime points of emission in both angle and redshift. In both variables, there is a significant amount of anti-correlation. The anti-correlation minimum has a relative magnitude compared to the central correlation maximum of about 20% in angle and 50% in redshift.

Citations

• Cosmological particle production: a review
• The Quest for B Modes from Inflationary Gravitational Waves
• Quantum field theory in de Sitter space: renormalization by point-splitting
• Quantized Fields and Particle Creation in Expanding Universes. I

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