Quantum-mechanical generation of gravitational waves in braneworld

TL;DR

This paper investigates the quantum generation of gravitational waves during inflation in a braneworld scenario, showing that the resulting spectrum can be approximated by a rescaled four-dimensional calculation, confirming previous hypotheses.

Contribution

It provides a numerical analysis of quantum fluctuations of gravitons in a five-dimensional braneworld during inflation, introducing a simple rescaling method for the power spectrum.

Findings

Vacuum fluctuations of Kaluza-Klein and zero mode gravitons contribute to the final spectrum.

The power spectrum is well approximated by a rescaled four-dimensional spectrum.

Results confirm previous theoretical speculation about the spectrum in braneworld inflation.

Abstract

We study the quantum-mechanical generation of gravitational waves during inflation on a brane embedded in a five-dimensional anti-de Sitter bulk. To make the problem well-posed, we consider the setup in which both initial and final phases are given by a de Sitter brane with different values of the Hubble expansion rate. Assuming that the quantum state is in a de Sitter invariant vacuum in the initial de Sitter phase, we numerically evaluate the amplitude of quantum fluctuations of the growing solution of the zero mode in the final de Sitter phase. We find that the vacuum fluctuations of the initial Kaluza-Klein gravitons as well as of the zero mode gravitons contribute to the final amplitude of the zero mode on small scales, and the power spectrum is quite well approximated by what we call the rescaled spectrum, which is obtained by rescaling the standard four-dimensional calculation following a simple mapping rule. Our results confirm the speculation raised in Ref. \cite{Kobayashi:2003cn} before.