Where does curvaton reside? Differences between bulk and brane frames

Abstract

Some classes of inflationary models naturally introduce two distinct metrics/frames, and their equivalence in terms of observables has often been put in question. D-brane inflation proposes candidates for an inflaton embedded in the string theory and possesses descriptions on the brane and bulk metrics/frames, which are connected by a conformal/disformal transformation that depends on the inflaton and its derivatives. It has been shown that curvature perturbations generated by the inflaton are identical in both frames, meaning that observables such as the spectrum of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies are independent of whether matter fields---including those in the standard model of particle physics---minimally couple to the brane or the bulk metric/frame. This is true despite the fact that the observables are eventually measured by the matter fields and that the total action including the matter fields is different in the two cases. In contrast, in curvaton scenarios, the observables depend on the frame to which the curvaton minimally couples. Among all inflationary scenarios, we focus on two models motivated by the KKLMMT fine-tuning problem: a slow-roll inflation with an inflection-point potential and a model of a rapidly rolling inflaton that conformally couples to gravity. In the first model, the difference between the frames in which the curvaton resides is encoded in the spectral index of the curvature perturbations, depicting the nature of the frame transformation. In the second model, the curvaton on the brane induces a spectral index significantly different from that in the bulk and is even falsified by the observations. This work thus demonstrates that two frames connected by a conformal/disformal transformation lead to different physical observables such as CMB anisotropies in curvaton models.