Gravitational waves from inflation on the brane

Abstract

We discuss the evolution of gravitational waves in a brane-world cosmology embedded in five-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime. We show that during slow-roll inflation, modelled as a period of quasi-de Sitter expansion on the brane, there is a discrete normalizable massless graviton mode. There is a mass gap due to the expansion, above which there is a continuum of massive modes. Only the massless mode is `light' compared with the Hubble scale during inflation, leading to the production of classical perturbations on large scales from vacuum fluctuations on small scales. We calculate the amplitude of these fluctuations at horizon-crossing and show that the standard four-dimensional result is recovered at low energies, but the amplitude of the perturbations is enhanced at high energies.