Quantum collapse as source of the seeds of cosmic structure during the radiation era

TL;DR

This paper explores a novel idea that quantum collapse during the radiation era could seed cosmic structures, but finds it indistinguishable from standard inflationary predictions due to observational constraints.

Contribution

It extends the self-induced collapse hypothesis to the radiation era, analyzing conditions under which collapse could influence structure formation.

Findings

Collapse during radiation era is theoretically possible.

Predictions are observationally indistinguishable from standard inflation.

Constraints limit the collapse timing and impact on the inflaton field.

Abstract

The emergence of the seeds of cosmic structure, from a perfect isotropic and homogeneous Universe, has not been clearly explained by the standard version of inflationary models as the dynamics involved preserve the homogeneity and isotropy at all times. A proposal that attempts to deal with this problem, by introducing "the self-induced collapse hypothesis," has been introduced by D. Sudarsky and collaborators in previous papers. In all these works, the collapse of the wave function of the inflaton mode is restricted to occur during the inflationary period. In this paper, we analyse the possibility that the collapse happens during the radiation era. A viable model can be constructed under the condition that the inflaton field variable must be affected by the collapse while the momentum variable can or cannot be affected. Another condition to be fulfilled is that the time of collapse must be independent of $k$. However, when comparing with recent observational data, the predictions of the model cannot be distinguished from the ones provided by the standard inflationary scenario. The main reason for this arises from the requirement that primordial power spectrum obtained for the radiation era matches the amplitude of scalar fluctuations consistent with the latest CMB observations. This latter constraint results in a limit on the possible times of collapse and ensures that the contribution of the inflaton field to the energy-momentum tensor is negligible compared to the contribution of the radiation fields.