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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Gravitational-Wave Mediated Preheating, Stephon Alexander, Sam Cormack, Antonino Marcianò, Nicolás Yunes
Gravitational-Wave Mediated Preheating, Stephon Alexander, Sam Cormack, Antonino Marcianò, Nicolás Yunes
Dartmouth Scholarship
We propose a new preheating mechanism through the coupling of the gravitational field to both the inflaton and matter fields, without direct inflaton–matter couplings. The inflaton transfers power to the matter fields through interactions with gravitational waves, which are exponentially enhanced due to an inflation–graviton coupling. One such coupling is the product of the inflaton to the Pontryagin density, as in dynamical Chern–Simons gravity. The energy scales involved are constrained by requiring that preheating happens fast during matter domination.
Cosmic Shear Of The Microwave Background: The Curl Diagnostic, Asantha Cooray, Marc Kamionkowski, Robert R. Caldwell
Cosmic Shear Of The Microwave Background: The Curl Diagnostic, Asantha Cooray, Marc Kamionkowski, Robert R. Caldwell
Dartmouth Scholarship
Weak-lensing distortions of the cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) temperature and polarization patterns can reveal important clues to the intervening large-scale structure. The effect of lensing is to deflect the primary temperature and polarization signal to slightly different locations on the sky. Deflections due to density fluctuations, gradient-type for the gradient of the projected gravitational potential, give a direct measure of the mass distribution. Curl-type deflections can be induced by, for example, a primordial background of gravitational waves from inflation or by second-order effects related to lensing by density perturbations. Whereas gradient-type deflections are expected to dominate, we show that curl-type deflections can …