Abstract
The recent detection of the B-mode polarization from the BICEP2 observation, if confirmed to be primordial, seems to be in tension with the upper bound on the amplitude of tensor perturbations from the PLANCK data. We consider a phenomenological model of inflation in which the microscopical properties of the inflationary fluid such as the equation of state or the sound speed jump in a sharp manner. We show that the amplitude of the scalar perturbations is controlled by a nontrivial combination of and before and after the phase transition while the tensor perturbations remains nearly intact. With an appropriate choice of the fluid parameters and one can suppress the scalar perturbation power spectrum on large scales to accommodate a large tensor amplitude.
- Received 17 April 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.063525
© 2014 American Physical Society