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Thermal gravitons from warm inflation
Stockholm University, Faculty of Science, Department of Physics. Stockholm University, Faculty of Science, The Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmo Particle Physics (OKC). Stockholm University, Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita). The University of Texas at Austin, USA.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-9490-020X
Number of Authors: 42025 (English)In: Physical Review D: covering particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology, ISSN 2470-0010, E-ISSN 2470-0029, Vol. 112, no 6, article id 063556Article, review/survey (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

In warm inflation (WI), the persistent thermal bath that is sustained by dissipative interactions with the inflaton field produces a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWs). In this paper we study the production and evolution of these GWs. Specifically, we investigate the emission of thermal gravitons (gravitons emitted by a thermal bath) from scattering with particles in the bath and then the evolution of the corresponding high-frequency GWs. We find that the bulk of thermal graviton production in WI occurs during the transition to radiation domination after inflation. Further, the energy density of thermal gravitons is enhanced by roughly 1 to 2 orders of magnitude compared to that in a radiation-dominated scenario with the same reheating temperature. We also calculate the spectrum of the resulting stochastic GW background and find that it has a distinctive shape, consisting of a peak at high frequencies ( ∼100  GHz) and an almost flat spectrum extending to low frequencies. The peak arises from emission of subhorizon modes that follow the temperature of the bath. The flat part of the spectrum corresponds to the modes that exit the horizon during WI and reenter during radiation domination and reflects the approximately constant temperature of the thermal bath during WI. We show that the detection prospects for the high-frequency peak of the GW spectrum, while improved slightly compared to the radiation-dominated case, still remain challenging. The thermal spectrum’s low-frequency plateau is typically subdominant to the amplitude of the standard vacuum tensor modes from inflation, although WI models can exist where the thermal graviton plateau surpasses the vacuum contribution without exceeding current observational limits on the tensor-to-scalar ratio. Furthermore, we calculate the thermal graviton contribution from WI to dark radiation and show that WI models are generally expected to satisfy current observational bounds including those from the cosmic microwave background.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2025. Vol. 112, no 6, article id 063556
National Category
Astronomy, Astrophysics and Cosmology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-249792DOI: 10.1103/rnvb-t4lxISI: 001586863500003Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105020446726OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-249792DiVA, id: diva2:2016627
Available from: 2025-11-26 Created: 2025-11-26 Last updated: 2025-11-26Bibliographically approved

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Department of PhysicsThe Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmo Particle Physics (OKC)Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita)
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