Testing B-ball cosmology with the CMB

TL;DR

This paper explores how B-ball decay in D-term inflation models can produce observable isocurvature fluctuations in the CMB, potentially detectable by MAP and PLANCK, linking early universe physics to cosmological observations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel connection between B-ball decay-induced isocurvature perturbations and their potential observability in the CMB.

Findings

Large isocurvature perturbations can arise from B-ball decay in D-term inflation.

The isocurvature fluctuation magnitude can be about 1% of adiabatic perturbations.

These fluctuations are within the detection capabilities of MAP and PLANCK.

Abstract

In D-term inflation models, the fluctuations of squark fields in the flat directions give rise to isocurvature density fluctuations stored in the Affleck-Dine condensate. After the condensate breaks up in B-balls, these can be perturbations in the baryon number, or, in the case where the present neutralino density comes directly from B-ball decay, perturbations in the number of dark matter neutralinos. The latter case results in a large enhancement of the isocurvature perturbation. In this case, the requirement that the deviation of the adiabatic perturbations from scale invariance due to the Affleck-Dine field is not too large imposes a lower bound on the magnitude of the isocurvature fluctuation of about $10^{-2}$ times the adiabatic perturbation. This should be observable by MAP and PLANCK.