Energy Transfer in Multi Field Inflation and Cosmological Perturbations

Abstract

In cascade inflation and some other string inflation models, collisions of mobile branes with other branes or orbifold planes occur and lead to interesting cosmological signatures. The fundamental M/string-theory description of these collisions is still lacking but it is clear that the inflaton looses part of its energy to some form of brane matter, e.g. a component of tensionless strings. In the absence of a fundamental description, we assume a general barotropic fluid on the brane, which absorbs part of the inflaton's energy. The fluid is modeled by a scalar with a suitable exponential potential to arrive at a full-fledged field theory model. We study numerically the impact of the energy transfer from the inflaton to the scalar on curvature and isocurvature perturbations and demonstrate explicitly that the curvature power spectrum gets modulated by oscillations which damp away toward smaller scales. Even though, the contribution of isocurvature perturbations decays toward the end of inflation, they induce curvature perturbations on scales that exit the horizon before the collision. We consider cases where the scalar behaves like radiation, matter or a web of cosmic strings and discuss the differences in the resulting power spectra.