A universal bound on the duration of a kination era

2025/01/28 by Eröncel, Cem, Gouttenoire, Yann, Sato, Ryosuke +2 · 5 citations
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.17226

Abstract

We show that primordial adiabatic curvature fluctuations generate an instability of the scalar field sourcing a kination era. We demonstrate that the generated higher Fourier modes constitute a radiation-like component dominating over the kination background after about 11 e-folds of cosmic expansion. Current constraints on the extra number of neutrino flavors ΔN_{\rm eff} thus imply the observational bound of approximately 10 e-folds, representing the most stringent bound to date on the stiffness of the equation of state of the pre-Big-Bang-Nucleosynthesis universe.

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