Evading the BBN bound with a soft stiff period

Brissenden, Lucy and Dimopoulos, Konstantinos and Tomberg, Eemeli (2026) Evading the BBN bound with a soft stiff period. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2026 (03): 069. ISSN 1475-7516

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Abstract

Cosmic inflation is the leading theory to explain early Universe history and structure formation. Non-oscillatory inflation is a class of models which can naturally introduce a post-inflationary stiff period of the Universe's evolution which boosts the signal of primordial gravitational waves (GWs), making it possible to observe them in forthcoming GW experiments. However, this pushes the GW energy density high enough to destabilise the process of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). This problem can be overcome by “softening” the stiff period, so that the field is gradually tending towards freefall from a frozen start. Here, we consider a modified hybrid inflation model where the stiff period is driven by the waterfall field, allowing the barotropic parameter of the Universe to vary, so that it does not violate the ΔN_eff constraint but produces a characteristic gravitational wave spectrum soon to be observable.