Trans-Planckian censorship, inflation, and excited initial states for perturbations
Abstract
The recently proposed trans-Planckian censorship conjecture (TCC) seems to require that the energy scale of inflation is significantly lower than the Planck scale (Hinf<10-20MPl) . This, in turn, implies that the tensor-to-scalar ratio for inflation is negligibly small, independent of assumptions of slow-roll or even of having a single scalar field, thus ruling out inflation if primordial tensor modes are ever observed. After demonstrating the robustness and generality of these bounds, we show that having an excited initial state for cosmological perturbations seems to be a way out of this problem for models of inflation.
- Publication:
-
Physical Review D
- Pub Date:
- January 2020
- DOI:
- 10.1103/PhysRevD.101.023526
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1910.04741
- Bibcode:
- 2020PhRvD.101b3526B
- Keywords:
-
- High Energy Physics - Theory;
- Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics;
- General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
- E-Print:
- 15 pages, comments welcome