2009/03/31 by Alexey Golovnev, Vitaly Vanchurin
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Classical mechanics #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmological perturbation theory #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Geometry #Inflation (cosmology) #Mathematical physics #Mathematics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scalar (mathematics) #Scalar field #Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics #Tensor (intrinsic definition) #Theoretical physics #Vector field #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.79.103524
published as Phys.Rev.D79:103524,2009 · minor changes, some references added; accepted for publication in Physical Review D
arxiv created 2009/05/14 · openalex publication_date 2009/05/22 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We analyze the behavior of linear perturbations in vector inflation. In contrast to scalar field inflation, the linearized theory with vector fields contains couplings between scalar, vector, and tensor modes. The perturbations decouple only in the ultraviolet limit, which allows us to carry out the canonical quantization. Superhorizon perturbations can be approximately analyzed due to suppressed mixing between different modes in the small field models. We find that the vector perturbations of the metric decay exponentially, but the scalar and tensor modes could remain weakly coupled throughout the evolution. As a result, vector inflation can produce significant correlations of the scalar and tensor modes in the CMB. For realistic models the effect is rather small, but not negligible.