arXiv subjects

Mayukh R. Gangopadhyay

Publications and source records attributed to Mayukh R. Gangopadhyay.

29 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

The paradigm of warm quintessential inflation and spontaneous baryogenesis

In this paper, we consider a scenario of spontaneous baryogenesis in a framework of warm quintessential inflation where the residual inflaton field, left out after warm inflation, plays the role of quintessence field at late times and is coupled to a non-conserved baryonic current. Assuming a four fermion $(B-L)$ violating effective interaction, we have demonstrated that the required baryon asymmetry can be produced successfully in this case. We show that the post-inflationary evolution, with the underlying scalar field potential, $V(ϕ)=V^4_0 \exp{(-αϕ^n/M_{\rm Pl}^4 ) }$, $n>1$ well suited to warm inflation, exhibits scaling behaviour soon after a brief kinetic regime. We show that the coupling of the scalar field to massive neutrino matter can give rise to exit from the scaling regime to cosmic acceleration at late times as massive neutrinos turn non-relativistic. The proposed model is shown to successfully describe the cosmic history from inflation to late-time acceleration, with the evolution independent of initial conditions, along with the generation of baryon asymmetry during the post-inflationary era. A brief analysis of relic gravity waves produced in the scenario is presented.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2021

Late time acceleration due to generic modification of gravity and Hubble tension

We consider a scenario of modified gravity, which is generic to late-time acceleration, namely, acceleration in the Jordan frame and no acceleration in the Einstein frame. The possibility is realized by assuming an interaction between dark matter and the baryonic component in the Einstein frame which is removed by going to the Jordan frame using a disformal transformation giving rise to an exotic effective fluid responsible for causing phantom crossing at late times. In this scenario, past evolution is not distinguished from $Λ$CDM but late time dynamics is generically different due to the presence of phantom crossing that causes a monotonous increase in the expansion rate giving rise to distinctive late-time cosmic feature. The latter can play a crucial role in addressing the tension between the observed value of Hubble parameter by CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) measurements and the local observations. We demonstrate that the Hubble tension significantly reduces in the scenario under consideration for the chosen scale factor parametrizations. The estimated age of the universe in the model is well within the observational bounds in the low and high red-shift regimes.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

A paradigm of warm quintessential inflation and production of relic gravity waves

We consider the framework of quintessential inflation in the warm background which is caused by the dissipation of the scalar field energy density into relativistic degrees of freedom. The dissipation process has important consequences for the evolution both at the levels of background as well as perturbation and allows us to easily satisfy the observational constraints.~Our numerical analysis confirms that the model conforms to observational constraints even if the field-radiation coupling strength is weak. In the warm background, we investigate the post inflationary evolution of relic gravity waves produced during inflation whose amplitude is constrained by the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis constraint. Further, we investigate the effect of coupling on the amplitude of gravity waves and obtain the allowed phase space between the model parameters. The mechanism of quintessential inflation gives rise to the blue spectrum of gravitational wave background at high frequencies. We discuss the perspectives of detection of the signal of relic gravity waves by future proposed missions. Improvements of their sensitivities in the high-frequency regime, in the future, might allow us to probe the blue tilt of the spectrum caused by the presence of a kinetic regime in the underlying framework of inflation.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Probing the era of reheating for reconstructed inflationary potential in the RS II braneworld

We analyse the epoch of reheating after an inflationary phase in the Randal Sundrum(RS) Type-$\rm II$ braneworld, where we did not consider any particular model of inflation, but rather reconstructed the inflationary potential solving the flow equations using Monte Carlo (MC) approach. It is shown numerically that a potential conceived through the MC reconstruction technique can be represented by an effective potential as a function of the number of e-foldings($N$). Then, the epoch of reheating is studied for this reconstructed potential. The relation between the reheating temperature ($T_{\rm reh}$) and the 5-dimensional Planck mass($M_5$) is established. Moreover, it is argued that there is a stringent bound on the critical reheating temperature that also translates to a tight bound on $M_5$ .

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2020

Thermodynamic potential for quark-gluon plasma with finite quark masses and chemical potential

We summarize the derivation of the finite temperature, finite chemical potential thermodynamic potential in the bag-model approximation to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) that includes a finite $s$-quark mass in the Feynman diagram contributions for both zero-order and two-loop corrections to the quark interaction. The thermodynamic potential for quarks in QCD is a desired ingredient for computations of the equation of state in the early universe, supernovae, neutron stars, and heavy-ion collisions. The 2-loop contributions are normally divergent and become even more difficult in the limit of finite quark masses and finite chemical potential. We introduce various means to interpolate between the low and high chemical potential limits. Although physically well motivated, we show that the infinite series Padé rational polynomial interpolation scheme introduces spurious poles. Nevertheless, we show that lower order interpolation schemes such as polynomial interpolation reproduce the Padé result without the presence of spurious poles. We propose that in this way one can determine the equation of state for the two-loop corrections for arbitrary chemical potential, temperature and quark mass. This provides a new realistic bag-model treatment of the QCD equation of state. We compute the QCD phase diagram with up to the two-loop corrections. We show that the two-loop corrections decrease the pressure of the quark-gluon plasma and therefore increase the critical temperature and chemical potential of the phase transition. We also show, however, that the correction for finite $s$-quark mass in the two-loop correction serves to decrease the critical temperature for the quark-hadron phase transition in the early universe.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

Study in the noncanonical domain of Goldstone inflation

Recent observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) indicate that a successful theory of cosmological inflation needs to have flat potential of the inflaton scalar field. Realizing the inflaton to be a pseudo-Nambu Goldstone boson (pNGB) could ensure the flatness and the sub-Planckian scales related to the dynamics of the paradigm. In this work, we have taken the most general form of such a scenario: Goldstone inflation, and studied the model in the noncanonical domain. Natural inflation is a limiting case of this model, which is also studied here in the noncanonical regime. Our result is compared with the recent release by Planck collaboration and it is shown that for some combination of the model parameters, a Goldstone inflationary model in the noncanonical realisation obeys the current observational bounds. Then, we studied the era of reheating after the end of inflation. For different choice of model parameters, constraints on the reheating temperature ($T_{\rm re}$) and number of e-folds during reheating($N_{\rm re}$) for the allowed inflationary observables (e.g. scalar spectral index($n_s$) and tensor to scalar ratio($r$)) are predicted for this model.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Explaining low l anomalies in the CMB power spectrum with resonant superstring excitations during inflation

We explore the possibility that both the suppression of the $\ell = 2$ multipole moment of the power spectrum of cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuations and the possible dip for $\ell = 10-30$ can be explained as well as a possible new dip for $\ell \approx 60$ as the result of the resonant creation of sequential excitations of a fermionic (or bosonic) closed superstring that couples to the inflaton field. We consider a D=26 closed bosonic string with one toroidal compact dimension as an illustration of how string excitations might imprint themselves on the CMB. We analyze the existence of successive momentum states, winding states or oscillations on the string as the source of the three possible dips in the power spectrum. Although the evidence of these dips are of marginal statistical significance, this might constitute the first observational evidence of successive superstring excitations in Nature.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Confronting Kähler moduli inflation with CMB data

In models of inflation obtained from string compactification, moduli vacuum misalignment leads to an epoch in the post-inflationary history of the universe when the energy density is dominated by cold moduli particles. This effect leads to a modification in the number of $e$-foldings ($N_{\rm pivot}$) between horizon exit of the CMB modes and the end of inflation. Taking Kähler moduli inflation as a prototype, the shift in $e$-foldings turns out to be a function of the model parameters which also determines the inflationary observables. We analyse this scenario numerically using publicly available {\sc{ModeChord}} and {\sc{CosmoMC}} with the latest \emph{Planck+BICEP2/Keck array} data to constrain the model parameters and $N_{\rm pivot}$. In light of the present and future precision data, the results show the importance of careful consideration of any post-inflationary non-standard epoch, as well as of the effects of reheating.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Constraints on Brane-World Inflation from the CMB Power Spectrum: Revisited

We analyze the Randal Sundrum brane-world inflation scenario in the context of the latest CMB constraints from Planck. We summarize constraints on the most popular classes of models and explore some more realistic inflaton effective potentials. The constraint on standard inflationary parameters changes in the brane-world scenario. We confirm that in general the brane-world scenario increases the tensor-to-scalar ratio, thus making this paradigm less consistent with the Planck constraints. Indeed, when the BICEP2/Keck constraints are included, all monomial potentials in the brane-world scenario become disfavored compared to the standard scenario. However, for natural inflation the brane-world scenario fits the constraints better due to larger allowed values of the number of e-foldings N before the end of inflation in the brane-world.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

New observational limits on dark radiation in brane-world cosmology

A dark radiation term arises as a correction to the energy momentum tensor in the simplest five-dimensional RS-II brane-world cosmology. In this paper we revisit the constraints on dark radiation based upon the newest results for light-element nuclear reaction rates, observed light-element abundances and the power spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Adding dark radiation during big bang nucleosynthesis alters the Friedmann expansion rate causing the nuclear reactions to freeze out at a different temperature. This changes the final light element abundances at the end of BBN. Its influence on the CMB is to change the effective expansion rate at the surface of last scattering. We find that our adopted BBN constraints reduce the allowed range for dark radiation to between $-12.1\%$ and $+6.2\%$ of the ambient background energy density. Combining this result with fits to the CMB power spectrum, the range decreases to $-6.0\%$ to $+6.2\%$. Thus, we find, that the ratio of dark radiation to the background total relativistic mass energy density $ρ_{\rm DR}/ρ$ is consistent with zero although in the BBN analysis there could be a slight preference for a negative contribution. However, the BBN constraint depends strongly upon the adopted primordial helium abundance.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2016

Evidence for Planck-scale resonant particle production during inflation from the CMB power spectrum

The power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background from both the {\it Planck} and {\it WMAP} data exhibits a slight dip for multipoles in the range of $l= 10-30$. We show that such a dip could be the result of the resonant creation of massive particles that couple to the inflaton field. For our best-fit models, the epoch of resonant particle creation reenters the horizon at a wave number of $k_* \sim 0.0011 \pm 0.0004 $ ($h$ Mpc$^{-1}$). The amplitude and location of this feature corresponds to the creation of a number of degenerate fermion species of mass $\sim (8-11) /λ^{3/2} $ $m_{pl}$ during inflation where $λ\sim (1.0 \pm 0.5) N^{-2/5}$ is the coupling constant between the inflaton field and the created fermion species, while $N$ is the number of degenerate species. Although the evidence is of marginal statistical significance, this could constitute new observational hints of unexplored physics beyond the Planck scale

astro-ph.CO↗