Abstract
An intriguing possibility that can address pathologies in both early Universe cosmology (i.e. the horizon problem) and quantum gravity (i.e. nonrenormalizability), is that particles at very high energies and/or temperatures could propagate arbitrarily fast. A concrete realization of this possibility for the early Universe is the tachyacoustic (or speedy sound) cosmology, which could also produce a scale-invariant spectrum for scalar cosmological perturbations. Here, we study thermal tachyacoustic cosmology (TTC), i.e. this scenario with thermal initial conditions. We find that a phase transition in the early Universe, around the scale of the grand unified theory (GUT scale; ), during which the speed of sound drops by 25 orders of magnitude within a Hubble time, can fit current CMB observations. We further discuss how production of primordial black holes constrains the cosmological acoustic history, while coupling TTC to Horava-Lifshitz gravity leads to a lower limit on the amplitude of tensor modes (), that are detectable by CMBpol (and might have already been seen by the BICEP-Keck Collaboration).
- Received 3 June 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.043528
© 2014 American Physical Society