Transdimensional physics and inflation

Abstract

Within the framework of a five-dimensional brane world with a stabilized radion, we compute the cosmological perturbations generated during inflation and show that the perturbations are a powerful tool to probe the physics of extra dimensions. While we find that the power spectrum of scalar perturbations is unchanged, we show that the existence of the fifth dimension is imprinted on the spectrum of gravitational waves generated during inflation. In particular, we find that the tensor perturbations receive a correction proportional to $(HR)^2$, where $H$ is the Hubble expansion rate during inflation and $R$ is the size of the extra dimension. We also generalize our findings to the case of several extra dimensions as well as to warped geometries.