TY  - EJOUR
AU  - Domcke, Valerie
AU  - Guidetti, Veronica
AU  - Welling, Yvette
AU  - Westphal, Alexander
TI  - Resonant backreaction in axion inflation
IS  - arXiv:2002.02952
M1  - PUBDB-2020-00857
M1  - arXiv:2002.02952
M1  - DESY-20-017
PY  - 2020
N1  - LaTeX, 1+28 pages, 10 figures
AB  - Axion inflation entails a coupling of the inflaton field to gauge fields through the Chern-Simons term. This results in a strong gauge field production during inflation, which backreacts on the inflaton equation of motion. Here we show that this strongly non-linear system generically experiences a resonant enhancement of the gauge field production, resulting in oscillatory features in the inflaton velocity as well as in the gauge field spectrum. The gauge fields source a strongly enhanced scalar power spectrum at small scales, exceeding previous estimates. For appropriate parameter choices, the collapse of these over-dense regions can lead to a large population of (light) primordial black holes with remarkable phenomenological consequences.
KW  - inflaton: field equations (autogen)
KW  - inflaton: coupling (autogen)
KW  - black hole: primordial (autogen)
KW  - power spectrum: scalar (autogen)
KW  - resonance: enhancement (autogen)
KW  - gauge field theory (autogen)
KW  - inflation (autogen)
KW  - axion (autogen)
KW  - Chern-Simons term (autogen)
KW  - back reaction (autogen)
KW  - nonlinear (autogen)
KW  - collapse (autogen)
KW  - velocity (autogen)
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)25
DO  - DOI:10.3204/PUBDB-2020-00857
UR  - https://bib-pubdb1.desy.de/record/435943
ER  -