Tracing Inflationary Imprints Through the Dark Ages: Implications for Early Stars and Galaxies Formation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how inflationary features influence early cosmic structure formation, affecting dark matter halos, primordial star formation, and black hole seeds, with implications for observations from JWST.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive framework connecting inflationary signatures to early galaxy formation, including effects on halo abundance, star formation, and primordial black holes.

Findings

Inflationary oscillations imprint on matter power spectrum.

Primordial features affect dark matter halo abundance.

Black hole seeds influence early galaxy properties.

Abstract

We explore how inflationary features shape the early stages of cosmic structure formation. Using the transfer function formalism, we trace the evolution of primordial perturbations, showing how causal physics and oscillatory signatures from inflation influence the matter power spectrum. The variance of smoothed density fields is then applied to model the collapse of overdense regions and predict dark matter halo abundances through the Press-Schechter framework. Extending to the baryonic sector, we analyze primordial gas collapse in minihalos, emphasizing molecular hydrogen cooling and the thermochemical pathways leading to Population III star formation. Finally, we examine primordial black holes as potential seeds for early galaxies, connecting their accretion-driven growth to the stellar masses and disk properties of high-redshift systems. Our results indicate that oscillatory features from inflation can leave measurable imprints on halo abundances and early galaxy properties, providing a testable link between high-energy physics and astrophysical observations with JWST