Geometry and cosmological perturbations in the bulk inflaton model

TL;DR

This paper investigates the geometry and large-scale cosmological perturbations in a braneworld inflation model driven by a bulk scalar field, deriving new expressions for bulk effects and analyzing their impact on brane cosmology.

Contribution

It introduces new integral expressions for the bulk Weyl tensor component and analyzes their effects on superhorizon scale perturbations in a bulk inflaton model.

Findings

Bulk effects reduce to 4D Einstein-scalar theory at low energies.

Bulk anisotropic effects appear only at second order in low energy expansion.

Effective theory remains consistent with standard cosmology on large scales.

Abstract

We consider a braneworld inflation model driven by the dynamics of a scalar field living in the 5-dimensional bulk, the so-called ``bulk inflaton model'', and investigate the geometry in the bulk and large scale cosmological perturbations on the brane. The bulk gravitational effects on the brane are described by a projection of the 5-dimensional Weyl tensor, which we denote by $E_{\mu\nu}$. Focusing on a tachionic potential model, we take a perturbative approach in the anti-de Sitter (AdS$_5$) background with a single de Sitter brane. We first formulate the evolution equations for $E_{\mu\nu}$ in the bulk. Next, applying them to the case of a spatially homogeneous brane, we obtain two different integral expressions for $E_{\mu\nu}$. One of them reduces to the expression obtained previously when evaluated on the brane. The other is a new expression that may be useful for analyzing the bulk geometry. Then we consider superhorizon scale cosmological perturbations and evaluate the bulk effects onto the brane. In the limit $H^2\ell^2\ll1$, where $H$ is the Hubble parameter on the brane and $\ell$ is the bulk curvature radius, we find that the effective theory on the brane is identical to the 4-dimensional Einstein-scalar theory with a simple rescaling of the potential even under the presence of inhomogeneities. % atleast on super-Hubble horizon scales. In particular, it is found that the anticipated non-trivial bulk effect due to the spatially anisotropic part of $E_{\mu\nu}$ may appear only at %second order in the low energy expansion, i.e., at $O(H^4\ell^4)$.