Entanglement generation from gravitationally produced massless vector particles during inflation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how gravitational effects during inflation produce massless vector particles, focusing on their entanglement across the horizon, with implications for primordial quantum correlations.

Contribution

It provides a gauge-invariant analysis of gravitational production of vector particles during inflation and explores superhorizon entanglement effects.

Findings

Highly energetic vector particles are preferentially produced.

Polarization effects significantly influence particle production.

Superhorizon entanglement between modes is characterized by von Neumann entropy.

Abstract

We study the gravitational production of spectator massless vector particles in a single-field inflationary scenario, and the related entanglement generation across the Hubble horizon. Accordingly, we consider a quasi-de Sitter background evolution, with additional metric inhomogeneities induced by the inflaton quantum fluctuations. Afterwards, we compute the corresponding production amplitude and show that it depends only on the transverse polarizations, appearing \emph{de facto} gauge-invariant, consistently with our interpretation of the vector field as the electromagnetic one. We notice that particle wavelengths turn out to be small compared to the Hubble radius, thus favoring sub-Hubble production relative to super-Hubble one. In particular, highly energetic vector particles are preferentially produced and we show that polarization effects provide a significant contribution to this behavior. Moreover, the production of nearly collinear particle pairs appears as the most probable configuration, due to the background conformal invariance of the theory and the plane-wave (massless particle-like) nature of the metric perturbation. We thus specialize our treatment to super-Hubble scales, confirming their subdominant contribution to the number density of produced particles, albeit setting a corresponding lower bound on the reheating temperature. In this scheme, we explore superhorizon entanglement between sub- and super-Hubble field modes, computing the corresponding von Neumann entropy and discussing the effects of horizon crossing on the generation of primordial entanglement.