The effective Planck mass and the scale of inflation

Observable quantities in cosmology are dimensionless, and therefore independent of the units in which they are measured. This is true of all physical quantities associated with the primordial perturbations that source cosmic microwave background anisotropies such as their amplitude and spectral prop...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The European physical journal. C, Particles and fields Particles and fields, 2015-05, Vol.75 (5), p.182-182, Article 182
Main Authors: Antoniadis, Ignatios, Patil, Subodh P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Anisotropy
Astronomy
Astrophysics and Cosmology
Cosmic background radiation
Elementary Particles
Hadrons
Heavy Ions
Inflation (Finance)
Measurement Science and Instrumentation
Nuclear Energy
Nuclear Physics
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Quantum Field Theories
Quantum Field Theory
Regular - Theoretical Physics
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
String Theory
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Summary:Observable quantities in cosmology are dimensionless, and therefore independent of the units in which they are measured. This is true of all physical quantities associated with the primordial perturbations that source cosmic microwave background anisotropies such as their amplitude and spectral properties. However, if one were to try and infer an absolute energy scale for inflation—a priori, one of the more immediate corollaries of detecting primordial tensor modes—one necessarily makes reference to a particular choice of units, the natural choice for which is Planck units. In this note, we discuss various aspects of how inferring the energy scale of inflation is complicated by the fact that the effective strength of gravity as seen by inflationary quanta necessarily differs from that seen by gravitational experiments at presently accessible scales. The uncertainty in the former relative to the latter has to do with the unknown spectrum of universally coupled particles between laboratory scales and the putative scale of inflation. These intermediate particles could be in hidden as well as visible sectors or could also be associated with Kaluza–Klein resonances associated with a compactification scale below the scale of inflation. We discuss various implications for cosmological observables.
ISSN:1434-6044
1434-6052
DOI:10.1140/epjc/s10052-015-3411-z