Bumpy inflation from explosive particle production

Abstract

We present a first-principles derivation of an effective inflaton potential with a bumpy feature. We consider the coupling of a spectator field χto the inflaton ϕsuch that χis massive enough for almost all values of ϕ, but becomes massless when the inflaton crossed the value ϕ_\star. This gives rise to a burst of χ-particle production at ϕ=ϕ_\star. By taking the backreaction of the particle production, we obtain a bumpy feature in the effective potential. We discover that for certain choices of the interaction constants and field scale relevant for particle production, the backreaction-induced bumpy effective potential can lead to a sizable enhancement in the curvature perturbation. In particular, the enhancement can be large enough to generate observationally relevant amounts of primordial black holes and stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds.