Torsion induced one-loop corrections to inflaton decay and the Stochastic gravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper studies how torsion-induced fermionic interactions at one-loop level can significantly suppress the gravitational-wave signals from inflaton decay, affecting future observational prospects.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of torsion-induced loop corrections to inflaton decay and their impact on stochastic gravitational-wave signals.

Findings

Loop corrections can suppress gravitational-wave signals by up to two orders of magnitude.

Enhancement of the gravitational-wave spectrum remains modest, not exceeding a factor of order unity.

Suppression effects may shift signals outside the sensitivity of future detectors.

Abstract

We investigate one-loop corrections from torsion-induced four-fermion interactions to inflaton three-body decay and their impact on the associated stochastic gravitational-wave signal. We find a pronounced asymmetry in the dependence on the renormalization scale $u$. While the enhancement of the gravitational-wave spectrum remains modest, not exceeding roughly a factor of order unity for representative inflaton masses well below the Planck scale within the perturbative regime, the suppression can be much stronger, reaching up to two orders of magnitude, corresponding to reductions at the percent level. These results imply that loop corrections, particularly fermionic self-interactions, can significantly reduce the predicted gravitational-wave signal in models based on tree-level analyses. This suppression may shift the signal outside the sensitivity range of future observations and should therefore be taken into account in realistic phenomenological studies.