Weak Gravity Conjecture in the sky: gravitational waves from preheating in Einstein-Maxwell-Scalar EFT

TL;DR

This paper explores how gravitational waves generated during the reheating phase after inflation can provide observational constraints on effective field theories involving Einstein-Maxwell-Scalar interactions, linking high-energy physics with cosmological signals.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of gravitational wave production during reheating within EFT frameworks, deriving bounds on the UV cutoff and inflaton mass from observational data.

Findings

Gravitational wave signals can constrain the EFT cutoff scale.

The UV cutoff cannot be lower than 10^{15} GeV for large field inflation.

Reheating dynamics produce observable high-frequency gravitational waves.

Abstract

The effective field theory (EFT) concept provides a necessary tool for obtaining general predictions of low-energy theory valid below its unitarity-breaking scale (cutoff scale). Early Universe inflation and subsequent reheating could be a unique setup for testing potentially observable effects coming from the derivative expansion of the corresponding EFT around the flat space vacuum. In this work, we consider an EFT describing perturbative reheating dominated by the decay of inflaton to photons caused by the dimension-5 operator $\phi F_{\mu\nu} F^{\mu\nu}$. We compute the graviton production during reheating and high frequency gravitational wave signal due to the bremsstrahlung effect in the presence of $R_{\mu\nu\lambda\rho}F^{\mu\nu} F^{\lambda\rho}$ operator. It may lead to the dominant contribution at high momenta if the EFT cutoff is lower than the Planck mass. Assuming the general consequences of the unitarity and causality constraints, which imply that all EFT operators should be present, and be suppressed by the scales following from the dimension analysis, we obtain the observational constraints (CMB bound for the dark radiation) on the mass of the inflaton and UV cutoff of gravity. We find that for the typical parameters of large field inflation models, the gravitational cutoff scale cannot be lower than $10^{15}$ GeV.