Generation of gravitational waves during early structure formation between cosmic inflation and reheating

• Published in: Journal of cosmology and astroparticle physics Vol. 2010; no. 4; p. 021
• Main Authors: Jedamzik, Karsten, Lemoine, Martin, Martin, Jérôme
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IOP Publishing 01.04.2010; Institute of Physics (IOP)
• Subjects: ASTROPHYSICS; ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY; CHAOS THEORY; COSMOLOGY; Cosmology and Extra-Galactic Astrophysics; DISTURBANCES; ENERGY DENSITY; EVAPORATION; GRAVITATIONAL WAVES; NONLINEAR PROBLEMS; Physics; POTENTIALS; SCALARS; Sciences of the Universe; cosmological perturbation theory; gravitational waves; sources; physics of the early universe; inflation
• ISSN: 1475-7516; 1475-7508; 1475-7516
• DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2010/04/021

In the pre-reheating era, following cosmic inflation and preceding radiation domination, the energy density may be dominated by an oscillating massive scalar condensate, such as is the case for V = m22/2 chaotic inflation. We have found in a previous paper that during this period, a wide range of sub-Hubble scale perturbations are subject to a preheating instability, leading to the growth of density perturbations ultimately collapsing to form non-linear structures. We compute here the gravitational wave signal due to these structures in the linear limit and present estimates for emission in the non-linear limit due to various effects: the collapse of halos, the tidal interactions, the evaporation during the conversion of the inflaton condensate into radiation and finally the ensuing turbulent cascades. The gravitational wave signal could be rather large and potentially testable by future detectors. Keywords->